When I was growing up, if anyone broke a glass in our house, my mother would carefully wrap the shards before she put them out for the trash collectors. \u201cI don\u2019t want them to cut their hands,\u201d she would say. If you broke a glass, it was only fair that you made sure the sharp edges didn\u2019t hurt anyone.<\/p>\n
When I complained once about a lot of ads on a TV show we were watching, she told me I wasn\u2019t being fair. \u201cAdvertisers pay for the show,\u201d she said. \u201cThey have a right to be heard.\u201d<\/p>\n
Later, when she was living in an apartment building and on crutches, she delivered meals to the men and women working in the building on Christmas. It was only fair, she said, since they couldn\u2019t be with their families.<\/p>\n
In the \u201990s contretemps that pitted Hillary Clinton<\/a> against Monica Lewinsky<\/a>, my mother chose both. She said they were both very smart and pretty and had a lot to offer. That was the fair way to look at it, she said. She also still had a soft spot for Bill.<\/p>\n My father was the same. When our neighbour in a Maryland beach town fell on hard times, my dad went down to the bank and cosigned the man\u2019s mortgage \u2013 without saying a word to anyone. It was only fair. The neighbour not only repaid his debt; when my dad died, the man drove to DC and waited in a line for an hour in the freezing cold to get into the wake, so he could tell my mom what my dad had secretly done.<\/p>\n When the Ku Klux Klan<\/a> burned crosses on the lawn of other beach neighbours, the only Jewish family in town, my dad tracked down the local Klan leader and told him to back off, or else. My dad, a police detective, made sure the Klansman saw his service revolver on his waist.<\/p>\n When Dad was in charge of the US Senate<\/a>\u2019s security, he judged politicians not only on their ideology but also on how they treated people. Were they nasty to the elevator operators and Capitol Police officers and cafeteria workers? That wasn\u2019t fair.<\/p>\n My parents did not think they behaved in an out-of-the-ordinary way. They considered fairness a very American trait, like their fierce patriotism. (Our clothes, napkins and candles always had to be red, white and blue on July 4th.)<\/p>\n Because of my parents, I always thought of fairness as an American trait, as well. My dad was an Irish immigrant and my mom\u2019s parents were Irish immigrants, and they built their working-class dream life here. America was fair to them, and they wanted to be fair to everyone else.<\/p>\n My family believed in government, for all its flaws, as a protector of the people. My first cousin Peggy Dowd was the secretary for Franklin D Roosevelt\u2019s aide Tommy Corcoran, a primary strategist of the New Deal. After 10 years of working together, they married and started a family. The social safety net created jobs for millions of people and helped pull the country out of the Great Depression. People treated public goods as public goods instead of moneymaking opportunities for the well-connected few.<\/p>\n For decades, until president Donald Trump, the government was trusted to protect food, water, the climate and the disadvantaged. It wasn\u2019t about which party you were in. Richard Nixon signed the National Environmental Policy Act and the Endangered Species Act into law. George HW Bush shepherded the Americans with Disabilities Act.<\/p>\n Of course, we have at times fallen spectacularly short of that ideal in our nation\u2019s history, including the original sin of slavery, the Alien and Sedition Acts, segregation and the internment of Japanese American citizens during the second World War. But I always thought that most Americans sought to be fair. The country was founded on that aspirational goal: All men are created equal.<\/p>\n Yet lately, so much seems unfair.<\/p>\n The fatal shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis.<\/p>\n The Trump family\u2019s kleptocracy and blatant grifting, reported so brilliantly by the New York Times\u2019 Eric Lipton and a team of reporters in a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation.<\/p>\n The racism and anti-Semitism that have reared up in raw and ugly ways.<\/p>\n Jeff Bezos\u2019s decimation of a legendary newspaper, The Washington Post, aiming to please a thin-skinned president, and David Ellison\u2019s decimation of a legendary news division, at CBS, aiming to please a Federal Communications Commission chair who\u2019s kissing the ring of a thin-skinned president who yearns to be king.<\/p>\n Trump and his congressional cronies cutting critical safety net programs and handing out big tax breaks to billionaire buddies. The gutting of the landmark Voting Rights Act and the wrong-headed view of the conservative supreme court majority that racism is over in the US.<\/p>\n The obscene pay of chief executives, growing 20 times as fast as workers\u2019 pay last year, and the obscene wealth in the tech world, with money cascading into the hands of greedy billionaires who lack empathy or even noblesse oblige. \u201cThe \u00fcber-rich,\u201d former White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel told me, disgustedly. \u201cI call it the \u20183-2-1\u2019. They\u2019re going for the third house, the second wife and the first plane. They\u2019re in a hermetically sealed world.\u201d<\/p>\n Trump taking the country to war with Iran, in part at the urging of his pal Bibi \u2013 without any sensible plan, debate, sanction from Congress or consideration as to how this might hurt Americans already struggling to make ends meet.<\/p>\n