The Seventeen Traditions

by Ralph Nader

  Dad always took our responses seriously, and we would respond to his answers with new questions. But he always focused on the bigger picture—that history shows that economies with more equitable distribution of wealth were far more prosperous, with bigger markets. They were more prone to deal with the needs of tomorrow, not just today, like healthful surroundings and a better future for our children and grandchildren. “Either we spread the wealth in a country where millions of humans go without,” he would say, “or we spread the misery.”

  In retrospect, it was like arguing with an ever-resilient law professor. He took great enjoyment from these tangos of minds. Father’s limitation-of-wealth idea offered us a constant flow of discourse; like Aladdin’s lamp, it needed only to be rubbed to work its educational magic. And it wasn’t just at home that he would put forth these ideas, but in the workplace and anywhere he thought there was a possibility for discussion.

  You may be wondering: Was there any plain old small talk in our family? Sure, there was plenty. But it was put on hold whenever we got into one of these serious discussions. At home we had the sense that there was a time and place for everything. Somehow we were never bored. When my parents had guests over, we would sit on the rug on the side of the living room and listen; every so often one of the grown-ups might make a passing reference to us, but these adult gatherings never centered on us preteen children, who were usually to be seen and not heard. By the same token, we never expected to perform or preen for the guests; instead, we listened and learned a lot about worldly matters. Looking back on these get-togethers, I marvel at how wide-ranging and informed the conversation always was: My parents and their friends traded political opinions on world and national news events, historical allusions, proverbs, and even poetry.

  That was the way our “education” went: Our work at school was supported by what we learned at home, and vice versa. When I got deeply interested in stamp collecting, it was because it helped me remember the names of countries all over the world. And when I got deeply interested in my classes, it was because of a special teacher who valued spontaneous discussion over rote memorization. Many of our teachers were from Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine, and they took their lifetime work quite seriously. There was no “gifted students” category then that allowed advanced students to take their own courses. All the students were in the same category, which in retrospect only helped our socialization as a group, while still allowing the more energetic students to excel. (On the other hand, our school buildings had no accommodations for students with disabilities, who were thus prevented from attending their area public schools. In some ways, those were years of low institutional expectations.)

  Many years later, the prize-winning journalist David Halberstam, who lived in Winsted as a youngster, wrote a feature article about these teachers for the Boston Globe; his piece did not reflect well on contemporary urban schools by comparison. Around the same time, I was rereading John Dewey on moral education. Eureka, I thought: That’s what my parents had given us at home. At school, we had learned facts. At home, my parents had taught us “character,” which the ancient philosopher Heracleitus called “destiny.” For us, they gave new meaning to the word “homework.”

  8.

  The Tradition of Discipline

  My siblings and I were raised to have respect for our mother and father—a respect born of our generations of family tradition, but also earned on a daily basis by their example. Yet of course we got into mischief, as all children do. And when we did, there were consequences.

  Mother and Father followed a finely calibrated series of parental reprimands, a system that we learned early and became accustomed to heeding. It started with a sudden stern look—and often that was enough to change our young minds before things went any further. When the look alone didn’t work, they relied on a sequence of three Arabic reprimands. The mildest was skoot or skiti (male or female), the next stage was sidd neeyak or siddi neeyik, and the third level was sakru neekoon. Translated loosely, these meant “hush your mouth” in varying degrees. If that didn’t work, we might be told to leave the dinner table and/or go to stand in the corner by the sewing machine. Or we might be assigned a chore, to drive the point home in another way. Our parents rarely spanked us, and when they did, it was no more than a gentle smack on the rear. Then as now, too many children have been picked up and shaken—as toddlers, even infants—or beaten by parents losing their self-control and abandoning themselves to rage. My parents were horrified by such behavior.

  But they knew the importance of enforcing their commands around the house. As my mother was known to say, “If parents don’t discipline, or they’re indecisive about it, their children won’t respect them.” It wasn’t enough to issue a reprimand, in other words—not if the parent merely unravels it a few minutes later by apologizing (even tacitly) and fawning all over the child. Any child who’s treated that way is being trained in the ways of manipulative behavior. “Children are clever,” Mother said, “they watch their parents and can take advantage where they see weakness.”

  Instead, my parents chose to show us where we had gone wrong, and they often did so by relying on traditional proverbs. The supply of proverbs at their disposal was countless, and they wielded them effortlessly. These sayings, which came from a rich oral tradition, drew on the imagery of the past to reframe all manner of human behavior for the generations of the present and future. The villagers and peasants of their Lebanese mountain towns would have known hundreds of these proverbs; our Aunt Adma knew more than a thousand. (Think a moment: How many proverbs can you call to mind, beyond Benjamin Franklin’s homilies—“A penny saved is a penny earned” or “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush”?)

  My dad, who worked seven days a week at the restaurant, used proverbs constantly. To a child talking silly, he would say (in Arabic), “Jokes are to words as salt is to food”—that is, don’t overdo it. To a child who’d put off his chores too long, the apt and famous proverb was, “Wait, oh mule, until the grass grows up.” When generosity was called for, he would say, “Empty hands are dirty hands.” Such proverbs were admonishments, to be sure. But they also managed to teach and uplift our horizons at the same time—far more than the staccato barking of parents who shout, “Stop it! I said stop it!” or “Cut it out, now, or you’ll be sorry,” and then have to repeat themselves over and over while the child ignores them. Dad was a devotee of the Socratic method; he loved nothing more than to pose a provocative question and then let it hang in the air. Once, when he noticed a bunch of teenagers in his restaurant laughingly pouring pepper in the sugar bowl, he came over to them and quietly asked, “Why are you insulting your parents?” as he took away the sugar bowl. Instead of asking them to leave, he merely walked away, leaving them to ponder over his words.

  Both my father and my mother were highly sensitive to the weakening of parent–child relationship in modern society—to the threat the marketplace posed to the concept of parental authority. Even back in the 1930s and 1940s, my mother noticed that some caring parents were afraid of their children, afraid of how they might react if they were disciplined. She noticed even more fear as she grew older, and often commented that “Americans are afraid of their children.” She believed that children who see that their parents are afraid of them will try to control their parents, who will then begin to lose their parental moorings as a result. We were always astonished to hear a classmate slinging harsh words at his parents. To be sure, we weren’t always privy to what provoked such outbursts; we just knew that in our family there were lines you never crossed. (Only later did we realize that such behavior could be symptomatic of child abuse behind closed doors—though the parents we observed never treated their children brutally, at least in public.)

  When we ran afoul of our own parents, did we get a chance to argue our case? Not in trivial, run-of-the-mill situations, but when there was a meaningful disagreement at stake, yes. “When my children would explain [themselves] to me,” m
y mother once said, “I would sometimes find that they were right, but I also explained my position.” Mother believed that a child should understand why he’s being told no, or yes. She always valued a good argument on a worthwhile subject. But she also believed that a child shouldn’t be allowed to argue for argument’s sake.

  As we grew into our teenage years, our parents were more willing to engage us in back-and-forth dialogues on our little domestic controversies. But they also had subtle ways of reminding us how much they labored for our well-being, and how many years of knowledge had gone into their positions. We often, if not always, gave them the benefit of the doubt. We respected their authority, never calling them by their first names no matter what our age. But we never became overly dependent on them, either. Their unassuming confidence only enhanced our own self-confidence—until we began to seem overconfident, in which case they were quick to reply, “So, since you’ve got all the answers, you don’t have any more questions, eh?”

  There was one respect in which Mother and Father showed absolutely critical self-discipline, and that was in their interactions with each other. As children, we were aware of occasional friction between our parents. We could sense the mood changing when that occurred. But the conflict never spilled out in our presence, for our parents believed that any such display would have reduced our respect for them. They were able to keep their differences very private from us and from their friends, in part because the differences between them were mostly ordinary tensions that worked themselves out in the course of daily life. For them, the well-being of their children, which took priority over petty disagreements, served as a kind of universal solvent, dissipating any lingering tensions.

  This mutual self-respect came home to us whenever we were at our friends’ homes and witnessed sharp exchanges and vitriol between their parents. Sometimes, just walking the residential streets, we would hear shouting from one home or another. Once, as I was walking downtown to do an errand for my mother, I saw a door fly open, and a husband rushed out shouting curses, with his wife right behind him throwing miscellaneous pots and utensils at him along with a stream of invective. There was nothing like that kind of spectacle to help a boy appreciate his parents’ efforts to preserve their emotional self-control.

  As my mother often said: “If you make something bigger, it becomes bigger; if you make it smaller, it becomes smaller.”

  9.

  The Tradition of Simple Enjoyments

  Ask yourself, when do you laugh the hardest and the longest? When you’re watching a situation comedy, a reality show, or a comic on late-night TV—or when you find yourself in hilarious situations with friends or family? No contest. Those bellyaching laughs come faster, and last longer, when you’re with friends or family. The television shows are part of the market-driven manufacturing of laughter. Friends and family are a gift, and those personal relationships engender deeper, more truthful mirth.

  We grew up in an environment of simple enjoyments, a world largely separate from market entertainment and almost wholly diverted by family entertainment. The ways we enjoyed ourselves might appear impossibly quaint to today’s youth, who’ve grown used to nonstop commercial entertainment so fast-paced that anything slower is greeted as BO-RING. Theirs is a video-audio, sensualized, commodified world that has displaced simple homemade pleasures, driving them down the rungs of attraction so that only the youngest children are expected to embrace them.

  In our town there was one movie theater, the Strand. It had Saturday matinees for children, and we were allowed to go to the movies about twice a year. More often we headed to the Soldiers’ Monument grounds, where we ate delicious sandwiches while feeling the coolness of the stone seats on our legs during a hot summer day. On Sunday afternoons we took our bikes on exhilarating rides down the tree-lined road to the nearby village of Colebrook. I can still feel the thrill of the breeze as we cruised down the long hill on our way home. Roller-skating on a neighborhood sidewalk was perfect for sunny days, but the rain didn’t stop us: We just headed downstairs and skated in our basement. I even shot basketballs in that cool basement, into a bottomless apple basket hung on the staircase.

  Our daily lives were full of these simple pleasures, no matter how old we were or what time of year it was. Running up to the garden to pick tomatoes or squash or beans, then back into the house to help prepare them for dinner, made us little ones feel we were part of a big act. Climbing up the venerable apple tree was a blast, and plucking the insect-scarred apples left us with small but very juicy bites. (Nobody had to tell us the apples were “organic”!) Just the thought of eating Mother’s homemade pastries, whose aroma wafted from the oven to the kitchen table, made our mouths water.

  Winter brought the crunch of a white Christmas, even as we walked to midnight service at the Episcopal Church. Mother would take us outdoors and teach us the alphabet by carving letters in the snow. As we grew older, we sledded to school on snowy mornings. Then, come Easter time, my mother would hard-boil dozens of eggs with onion skins, staining them dark red. After they were all hidden, we would go running around finding them—and then compete to see which egg would survive what we called the “cracking competition.” Each of us would make a wish, and then crack our egg up against one of our siblings’ eggs. We looked forward to the cracking competition for weeks.

  Summers were an exciting time; we all looked forward to a change of pace. When we were little children, Dad would take us up to Highland Lake, where we’d go driving over the spillways between the lake and the spill of water down the valley into the Mad River, cruising through half a foot of moving water. “Wheee!” we’d cry. “Turn around and do it again, Dad!” Then he would take us up to Crystal Lake, the bucolic town reservoir, where we would look out over the water with a kind of reverence. Coming from the Middle East, where water is scarce and deserts plentiful, our parents taught us to view abundant clean water with gratitude.

  We spent our summer vacations with our Aunt Adele, my mother’s older sister, and her six children. She and her husband, Selim, lived in Toronto, Canada, and we alternated summers with her family, spending one summer in Connecticut, the next in Canada. Our age-matched cousins were like another set of brothers and sisters, and our aunt and uncle stepped in as surrogate parents. Our families were not only extended but amplified by the sheer variety of personality and experience our cousins brought to the mix. Their lives were different from ours in a hundred small ways: They wore school uniforms and we did not, followed hockey where we followed baseball, pronounced English words differently—and such differences made for endless hours of fun and argument.

  Though our parents had ten children crammed into our relatively medium-sized house during those summers, I never remember hearing the mothers complaining about the extra work, or even saying they felt especially tired. The older children helped them with the cooking and cleaning chores. And having two sets of parents certainly helped preserve order: When it came to being disciplined or taking instructions, we listened to and obeyed our aunt and uncle as surely as we did our own parents.

  Our house had a screened-in porch upstairs, with room for three or four beds in summer, another memorable setting in our childhood landscape. Even the children of the next generation, beginning with my sister Laura’s children, always relished the chance to sleep on the exalted porch. It was seen as a first-class treat. At night we could hear the crickets, see the stars and the moon and the clouds, tell stories, engage in horseplay, laugh, while my mother and her sister were visiting downstairs, entertaining each other with their own stories of childhood, and news from home. They would tease each other, and the gales of laughter would come wafting through the windows. Now and then, when it sounded as though we were getting too boisterous up on the porch, one of the sisters downstairs would say, “That’s enough, children. Go to sleep.” That would usually quiet us down—but not always. Then they had to come up to the porch to enforce this point

  Our mother and aunt each felt free
to compliment or admonish any of us as they saw fit, and this had the effect of reinforcing many of our family’s traditions. Whenever we came to them to settle a conflict that cropped up among us, they were both equally likely to offer up one of the sayings they learned together in childhood: “It doesn’t hurt to be generous,” or “Don’t judge until you know the whole story,” or “If someone does you harm, do him some good”—advice we’d all find useful throughout life, and all passed along in a way that was memorable, short, and sweet.

  When it was our turn to travel to Canada, we usually joined Aunt Adele’s family in a cottage on Lake Simcoe or Lake Couchiching. The routine would be less varied than when we were together in town. But those weeks we spent together were more attuned to nature. They were shaped by our closeness to the water, by afternoons spent swimming on a beachfront just down from the cottage, by boating, fishing, hiking, picking berries, games of hide and seek in the woods. My mother and her sister knew how to delegate responsibility to the older children, trusting our older cousins to keep an eye on us when we went to amusement parks in Toronto.

  As we grew up and went to college, these joint summer vacations became less frequent. But we all remember them fondly, and in the 1980s Shaf organized several summers with our cousins and their families at Georgian Bay, so that a new generation of children could get to know each other in the setting that had meant so much to us when we were youngsters.