My friend David Moriah, an organizational consultant, outdoor educator, lifelong baseball fan and longtime contributor to this blog’s Comments section below, died last month after a heroic, wise, often joyful, always resolute stand against prostate cancer. It was a journey he chronicled for his wide and devoted circle(s) of friends on the Caring Bridge website under the banner of “Adventures in ChemoLand” throughout the 15 months he battled the disease. (Yes, David was quick with humor…)
Ten years ago today, I posted “A Liberal’s July 4 Love Letter to America” in this space, and David was the first to jump in with a comment:
“Nicely stated, my friend. Happy Independence Day! (And don’t you think it would be great if we had a national holiday called ‘Interdependence Day’”?)
I answered him at the time with something akin to “Heck yes!,” and have periodically revisited the idea ever since, without anything coming of it. But setting aside some time to celebrate our interdependence on a day devoted to the “good trouble” of a successful revolution in the service of human freedom strikes me as a grand and necessary idea to put into place if we are ever to strike the right balance between the twin beauties of individual Selves and the Brother-Sisterhood that sustains and inspires those Selves to flourish to the greatest possible degree.
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The country I was writing that letter to one decade ago has taken some unexpected twists and turns since I aired the sentiments I did that day, and it feels more than a little eerie reviewing the post today. But if I’ve learned anything over this decade and through most all my life before that, it’s not to hold my breath until the world begins to hum along as we all “expected.”
The old Yiddish proverb says it all: “You want to make God laugh? Tell him your plans.”
But now, with David’s passing, the reality of our interdependence in the astoundingly complex societal webs we have woven in this world rings all the more urgent and true to me. It is in front of us daily as our political and economic system continues to confer outsized recognition and rewards on those it projects as ruggedly individualistic, self-made persons, beholden to no one’s interests but their own.
Today’s over-emphasis on individual actors in the name of unfettered free market capitalism and at the expense of the common good has given us the world that such a perspective deserves. It is a world that few are particularly happy with, that is clearly not working for huge swaths of our own country and even less so for the larger world beyond.
And the reality is that it is simply not sustainable—for anyone. We know this, not all that deep in our bones.
The evidence for it is everywhere we look if we but venture out from our gated compounds and take in the enormity of suffering that unnecessarily pervades our world.
David was an ardent Christian who strove mightily to live the gospel in his everyday life. His focus on interdependence found its roots in the apostle Paul in his “First Epistle to the Corinthians”:
20 As it is, there are many parts, but one body…But God has put the body together, giving greater honor to the parts that lacked it, 25 so that there should be no division in the body, but that its parts should have equal concern for each other. 26 If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it.”
On a finite, overheating and increasingly tempestuous planet, these ancient words ring as both figuratively and literally, spiritually and materially, true. They and many other words echoing them (a few highlighted as we sign off below), should inspire us both morally (if we harbor a conscience) and from a sheer survival standpoint even if moral concerns do not trouble us.
The 8 billion and counting of us are stuck with each other on Planet Earth, in one way or other(s), till the death that comes to all of us in our common humanity will do us part. Acting as if we are not that one body only prolongs and intensifies the disease that threatens its very survival.
We must, and we can, do better. Together.
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• “The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual. The impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community.”
—William James, 1880
• “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.”
—John Muir, 1911
• “Interdependence is and ought to be as much the ideal of man as self-sufficiency. Man is a social being. Without interrelation with society he cannot realize his oneness with the universe or suppress his egotism. His social interdependence enables him to test his faith and to prove himself on the touchstone of reality.”
—Mahatma Gandhi, 1929
• “The basic thought that guides these specific means of national recovery is not narrowly nationalistic. It is the insistence, as a first consideration, upon the interdependence of the various elements in all parts of the United States – a recognition of the old and permanently important manifestation of the American spirit of the pioneer.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1932
• “… for many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny. And they have come to realize that their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom.”
—Martin Luther King Jr., 1963
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Bonus track, in case you’
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Comments, questions, attaboys or arguments suggestions for future posts, songs, poems? Scroll on down below, and/or on Facebook, where you can Follow my public posts and find regular 1-minute snippets of wisdom and other musings from the world’s great thinkers and artists, accompanied always by lovely photography. https://www.facebook.com/andrew.hidas/
Deep appreciation to the photographers! Unless otherwise stated, some rights reserved under Creative Commons licensing
Homepage rotating banner photos (except for library books) by Elizabeth Haslam https://www.flickr.com/photos/lizhaslam/
Library books by Larry Rose, Redlands, California, all rights reserved, contact: larry@rosefoto.com
Rowers by Sean Robertson, Halifax, Nova Scotia https://unsplash.com/@knuknuk
David and grandson courtesy of the Moriah family
Brilliant piece Drew. I have read it twice now and will reread it again, reflecting on each gem in this crown of insight and compassion. Thanks for the words that so many of us lack to express.
Pleasure’s mine, Kirk, as always, thanks for carrying on! Any ex-pat 7-4 action on tap there in Costa Rica?
Just a few flags with a black strip of cloth. Most of us hate fireworks because our dogs freak out.
A beautiful tribute to your friend, and a timely reminder to us all.
The evocative photograph of the rowers says it all.
Thank you Mary, and you’re right about the foto, will be happily conveying your impression to the photographer, among many who so greatly enhance what I’m able to offer here.
Drew, you have lost two dear friends to prostate cancer in just three years. Thankfully, I won my battle with prostate cancer because I caught it very early before it metastasized; I was spared both chemo or radiation treatment. It did, however, create a greater understanding of the things we call life: love, even hate, time spent with family and friends, anger, laughter and so much more. For the lucky, it’s a joyous, albeit bumpy road trip that finds its final destination shrouded in mystery. The place and timing of death elude us. It’s an inevitable blindness. Unlike Tiresias, we lack the sense to see little beyond that which lies directly in our front. The Apostle Paul in his First Epistle to the Corinthians described it as “looking through a glass darkly.”
On this day, as we celebrate our nation’s 249 birthday, I’ll raise the Apostle Paul one and call it “looking through a glass more darkly than ever.” Too many Americans now advocate a policy of nationalistic selfishness and, in doing so, have banished kindness and equality to the remotest of lands.
USAID, an agency designed to helping the poorer countries of the world battle hunger, disease and poverty, has been devastated by our government’s slashing its funding.
Our government rounds up non-white immigrants like cattle and brands them with the scarlet letters—U-N-W-A-N-T-E-D. Too many seem deaf to Thomas Jefferson’s admonition of King George III in his Declaration of Independence: “He (George III) has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.” Isn’t it ironic that Stephen Moylan, an Irish immigrant and an aide-de-camp to George Washington, was the first person to call our country “the United States of America?”
Why do many willingly accept the “obstruction of the administration of justice” as a necessary step in preserving democracy?
Jefferson accused George III of erecting “a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people.” Sound familiar?
The battlelines between MAGA objectives and those delineated in the Declaration of Independence have never been so clearly defined; it demands our immediate attention. If we allow ourselves to believe that what’s happening now in the darkest halls of government is a transitory thing, it might be too late. We may be forced to find another Jefferson to pen a new declaration of independence.
Hey Robert, thought I’d answered this the other day but apparently I had only been thinking about answering and the thought became the deed—at least in my mind!
Anyway: MAGA on one side (or in one corner) vs. the constitution in the other—I could see that as a powerful, point-by-point graphic. I think the decimation of USAID is perhaps the saddest of all Trumpian incursions against all that is decent and best about America. Coupled with the now indiscriminate and joyfully vicious roundups of immigrants of all ages and legal statuses, it will stand as a damning indictment of this era’s temporary (we can only hope) turn to insanity.
Independence Day indeed, thanks for sharing your delightful friend, David – clearly he will be missed by all who had the pleasure to know him.This provocative post got me thinking of the notion of interdependence, ringing a number of bells. One of my favorite teachers in graduate school was Max Lerner, who described himself as an “organismic thinker.” – The universe is alive, and everything is connected to everything else… his son, Michael, mirrors his father’s worldview – “A spiritual sensibility encourages us to see ourselves as part of the fundamental unity of all being. If the thrust of the market ethos has been to foster a competitive individualism, a major thrust of many traditional religious and spiritual sensibilities has been to help us see our connection with all other human beings.
— Michael Lerner
Your post is a most excellent reminder to us all to walk the talk of interdependence in our everyday lives, as David Moriah so clearly did.