What Does It Take to Crack Open a Heart?

Some people, it seems, grow older without much change. With an unchanging personality, there is no epiphany along the way. Others change by hardening up and growing a shell. Chuck Collins belongs in neither group. His heart has been cracked open more than once, and new growth results every time. Born on Third Base is much more than his personal life story—we don’t even get his whole life story, but that’s all right. Chuck’s raison d’être has become working to reduce wealth inequality in America, and he makes his case in this book.

The great-grandson of Oscar Meyer was born into what we have begun to call the “one percent,” the wealthiest Americans. Thomas Piketty, author of Capital in the Twenty-First Century, calls a society governed by huge inherited wealth and power “patrimonial capitalism,” and Collins openly acknowledges that he had to do nothing personally to be wealthy. He quotes Edgar Bronfman, Seagrams heir, who said, “To turn $100 into $110 is work. To turn $100 million into $110 million is inevitable.”

At age 26, Collins made the decision to give away his inheritance but acknowledges that he still had the advantages of American citizenship, education, freedom from debt, white privilege, and a supportive family.

Touring the country in 2003 with billionaire Bill Gates to clarify the federal estate tax and why the wealthy should pay it gratefully, Collins and Gates told their audiences that even first-generation American entrepreneurs are not “self-made” because they had the benefits of our economic system, laws, roads, other transportation and communication systems, education systems, public libraries, and public investment in new technology. Collins gives the key moment of one talk to Gates, who spins a tale in which God’s heavenly treasury is running low, and She [this is the way Gates told the story; I am not editorializing] came up with a plan: the next two spirits to be born could bid on the country in which they would be born. The winner of the auction would be born in the United States, the loser “in an impoverished nation in the global south.” Gates then asked the audience what is had been worth, to them, to be born in the United States—and, so, how much of their net worth they were willing to pledge to leave behind for the common good.

Paying the estate tax (which applies only to households with wealth of $10.8 million and so has little or nothing to do with small family farms, though lobbyists and advertising against the tax would have the public believe otherwise), Collins and Gates proposed to their audiences, is a way of showing gratitude for social benefits received. It is a way to pass benefits they received along to future generations.

Booksellers, authors, and others are often asked, from one administration to the next, “If you could have the president read just one book, which one would it be?” Born on Third Base is my answer to the question today. Hmmm. I wonder if I could get our new U.S. Representative to Congress to read it? That would be a start....

But this is a book for every American, rich or poor, influential or left behind, for a couple of important reasons.

Why should you read this book?

First, one change of heart Collins had involved the language of class warfare, the “bottom-up antagonism expressed in rhetorical attacks against the rich....” He had used it himself in his early campaigns for social justice, but no one, Collins realized, likes to be hated,  and hating the wealthy will never turn them into allies. So it’s a losing game. He goes further in the other direction. In the same way he invites the rich to get to know their financially less fortunate fellow citizens, Collins invites members of the “99 percent” to reach out to the wealthy—not with a hand out but with the empathy and respect every individual deserves. A lot of rich people, he says, are very isolated socially, and they, too, whether they should or not, have financial fears. Empathy is a theme that runs through every chapter of the book.

Second, this is not just another book telling you what’s wrong in our country and the world and how it got to be wrong, because another important theme is change. Collins tells stories, gives examples, and offers concrete, specific suggestions. If you’ve been downhearted lately about the unleashing, once again, of predatory, extractive capitalism, this is the book you need to read. You’ll find in it steps you can take, beyond protest, to help bring about the changes you want to see.

Empathy and change. Change begins with empathy. We’re all in this together. Yes, we can!!!

Born on Third Base: A One Percenter Makes the Case for Tackling Inequality, Bringing Wealth Home, and Committing to the Common Good

by Chuck Collins

Chelsea Green, softcover, 267pp w/ index

$17.95

Have We Left Macomb County Yet?

For thus hath the Lord said unto me,

Go, set a watchman, let him declare what he seeth.

-      Isaiah 21:6

Go Set a Watchman,

by Harper Lee

NY: HarperCollins, 2015

Hardcover, $27.99

We’re back in Macomb County, Alabama. It is the 1950s. Jean Louise, formerly the child called “Scout,” now 26 years old and visiting from New York City, thinks she has outgrown her hometown -- but she still wrestles with the idea of marrying Hank, who would never live anywhere else. Her beloved  brother Jem is dead. Jean Louise doesn’t fit in with the women of the town, whatever their age. The last straw is discovering that her father-hero-god, Atticus, has feet of clay. Atticus is a flawed human being. But then, Scout herself is not perfect....

Everyone in America knows the story behind this book. We have all read in the newspapers and online and heard on the radio (and online) that Go Set a Watchman was Harper Lee’s first version of the novel that eventually became the award-winning classic To Kill a Mockingbird. Her editor in the 1950s was most taken with the flashbacks to childhood in the manuscript and suggested that the author rewrite the story, setting it entirely in that era, telling it all from the child's point of view. Perhaps it was the image of Scout and Jem in the balcony of the courthouse, watching their father from the “colored” section, that inspired the editor’s suggestions.

Did the editor also urge Lee to make Atticus a more sympathetic character? In the rewrite, was it Harper Lee’s idea or the editor’s to have Atticus lose the case in which he defended the black man from a rape charge, rather than winning it, as in GSAW’s backstory? Why the change? For the sake of realism or because the novel’s readership would find the TKAM outcome more acceptable?

Because I know so many writers and hear so many of their stories of revising and rewriting and responding to suggestions from agents and editors, and because I have been writing a first novel myself this year (writing, revising, beginning again after scrapping earlier chapters), I am fascinated by Harper Lee’s two novels – the distance between them, the changes, the different shapes, and the editor’s input. When I started reading the first pages of GSAW, I couldn’t help reading each word and sentence very consciously, remarking every choice of word and arrangement of words, but gradually the story took me over, and I let it carry me like a river.

When Jean Louise goes to visit Calpurnia and realizes for the first time what her aunt meant by insisting that Calpurnia was like family but not family, when Calpurnia does not respond to Jean Louise as if to her little child, Scout, a crack appears in Jean Louise’s picture of the way she grew up. I could not help thinking in this section of a far lesser novel, The Help. Love across such differences in situation could only be ambivalent. Soon Jean Louise realizes a similar ambivalence in her love for Hank and even for her father. She realizes her separateness. What she must learn before the end of the book is that separateness does not contradict her belonging to a community and that she does not have to agree with every opinion held by another individual to love that person.

If Harper Lee’s publisher had, years ago, given us instead TKAM instead of GSAW, would we ever have had the former at all? And what would have been the fate of GSAW if published in 1960 instead of TKAM? It strikes me that the American reading public in 1960 can be seen as Jean Louise at 26 years old in GSAW: on the cusp of growing up, starting in that direction, but with a long way to go.

If Harper Lee had published this newly released novel thirty years ago, might she have gone on to write a third by now, one in which Jean Louise reaches a wise maturity and works with Calpurnia to bring about a New South? We will never know, and there will not be a third Harper Lee Novel. But when I reached the last page of Go Set a Watchman, I was very glad to have been able to read it. I expected to find it interesting only because I was curious, for reasons mentioned above, and found, in addition, a novel satisfying to read in itself. That was a complete surprise, given most of the reviews.

What I wonder now is, where is our country in 2015, fifty-five years after the original publication of Harper Lee’s beloved classic? How many Americans are able to continue a conversation across differences, political as well as racial and religious? Do we run away from those whose opinions we find distasteful and repulsive, refusing to have anything to do with them, seeing the world as Us vs. Them?

After reading the new release, do we think Jean Louise will grow up? At the end of the story, we have hopes that she will, but the larger question probably is, will we? And where are we today, relative to where we were in 1960? What do you think?