Inauguration 2025: A Letter to My Daughter
Dear Elizabeth:
You recently turned fifteen, and we recently inaugurated our 47th President of the United States. These two events are unconnected except in the mind of a father who wonders what the future holds for his daughter. I’ve had conversations recently with other parents, and within that small sample size, this concern is a common one. But it’s a concern that unites parents of all generations. What in the world, we have always wondered, will our children face in the coming days?
I’m old enough to know that I don’t know what lies in store for you. I turned fifteen in 1968. Because the Sixties had a keen sense of advertisement and self-promotion, I was handed an identity based on gender, race, and class that claimed to question the legitimacy of basing an identity on gender, race, and class. Sometimes I saw the hypocrisy of my situation, sometimes I didn’t. Mostly I came to agree with Kurt Vonnegut who wanted his epitaph to read: “The only proof he needed for the existence of God was music.” I didn’t spend much time believing in God, but I did believe in Led Zeppelin.
What I do know about your immediate future is that you will witness the unharnessed and undisguised abuse of power in the political arena. But remember, “power” is a slippery word. When it’s used to accomplish the goals that suit us, we might call it “devotion” or “enthusiasm” or “dedication,” or even “vision.” And when it’s used to secure the things that don’t suit us or disgust us, we call it “greed” or “lawlessness” or “violence” or “recklessness.”
I would first ask you to remember this: power, however we define it, is fundamentally a human energy available to every one of us in varying degrees at every moment. But you should view it as you might view a stick of dynamite: the acquisition of it requires, as well, that you use it responsibly. If you don’t, you risk harming others. You risk exploding communities, dismantling necessary institutions, and leveling the fundamental rights and freedoms that our species has been evolving for a very long time and at a very great cost.
I would next tell you that everyone needs power and that many don’t have it, that most of us spend large amounts of time every day trying to get it, to secure it, and to use it as we put our lives together in ways that benefit ourselves, our families, and our communities. But the acquisition of power can become addictive and lead you into arenas where you don’t belong. No one believes that having a flourishing portfolio qualifies you to build and install kitchen cabinets. But neither does it qualify you to run a courtroom or a country. America at this moment, however, is currently divided, openly and violently, about this last statement, and therein lies the problem that I fear you will face as you put your life together over the coming decades.
Because the phrase “political power” has become roughly synonymous with the word “power,” I want to bring George Orwell into the conversation:
Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship . . . The object of power is power.
This, predictably, is from his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. However, because power is a human energy, it can also be turned inward. This kind of power can turn you away from the alluring world of ten thousand things. It can be used, instead, to renovate your internal structures of compassion, tolerance, and selflessness, the very qualities that also define us as a species and that have contributed to our longevity on this spinning, blue orb.
And also the very qualities that power, irresponsibly used, will seek to compromise, damage, and at times even eradicate. I’m thinking now of the concerted efforts throughout our history to destroy entire cultures and civilizations, to visit genocide upon targeted populations.
It takes power to do that, and it takes power to resist it, the kind of power that arises from turning inward, from understanding the essential nature of the mind, or to put it less clinically, from enriching the fundamental compassion that I believe fires the human spirit. We need this kind of enrichment now more than we have in a very long time.
Compassion, though, is like yeast. It has to be placed in the right environment to grow. Otherwise, it just waits, silently, until those environments arrive.
I’m daily thankful that compassion will wait as long as it takes for its host to activate it. My advice to you is to spend a little time every day bringing it to life. You have seen my own Tibetan teachers struggling with infinite patience to teach me how to do it. You have met the Dalai Lama. You know, as he has said countless times, that all of us—no exceptions—are potentially creatures of infinite compassion, if only we would recognize and cultivate the power to embody this renovating quality in all that we do, think, and say.
Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan claims that we are distinguished, as a species, by a “perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only after death.” Maybe. It’s clear, I realize, that he’s speaking of the self-aggrandizing power that often shows up in the political arena. And seems now to be openly on display in our own beleaguered country.
But I would also point out that he doesn’t qualify what kind of power he has in mind. Let’s imagine, then, you and I, that he’s talking about the power needed to renovate our inner lives. Let’s resist Hobbes’ dire vision, and the vision that we currently see on display everywhere we turn. Let’s imagine he’s telling us that compassionate communities arise from compassionate individuals; that we need to seek out the power of genuine compassion; that we must grow these compassionate individuals because we’ve located the power to do so, and that we ought to devote ourselves to the responsible use of this power long before we take on the task of telling others what to think and do; that only from devotion of this sort can we expect to create the communities that attempt to include everyone in their definitions of love and kindness and tolerance.
Let’s give that a try, OK?
It’s a tall order, I know. The histories of the great souls have said as much. After all, it’s difficult to examine ourselves because the problems we find there turn out to be the very problems we want to confront in others. But those histories have also shown us that when sailing through dire straits, this is the first order we need to follow. And the straits, from where I now sit, look very dire indeed. Rebuild yourself, then, in compassionate ways, undertake that journey, and sooner or later, others will want to see your charts.
