RODEO’S INSTITUTIONAL KIN—THE SHEEPDOG TRIALS
“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break the bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory will swell when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”
President Abraham Lincoln, First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1861
We are committed to “the creation of forums for the respectful exchange of ideas and perspectives in the pursuit of solutions to the region’s difficulties.”
Center of the American West Mission Statement
One week ago, in the May 15 entry (“Holding On to Faith”) in the “Not My First Rodeo” blog, I presented to the world my honest opinion of President Donald J. Trump. Refusing to participate in a popular custom of our time, I did not demonize him. On the contrary, I invited him to take a simple step toward consistency, by recognizing that since he is a self-declared Christian, he is positioned to take the Book of Matthew (especially Chapter Five) as “a strategic plan” for becoming a better leader for his nation.
One longtime friend of the Center felt that my remarks were “sad to see”: “This commentary,” he wrote, “moves you away from the political neutrality that you have evidenced for many years.”
That’s worth thinking about.
Indeed, as Faculty Director of the Center, I have for years prohibited myself from making political endorsements of candidates or initiatives. I have understood this to be an important feature in maintaining the Center’s credibility in a time of polarization.
But go one level deeper, and my commitment reveals a bedrock trait: my ambition, or commitment or, really, compulsion, to serve as a moderator who works to ensure that people who deserve to be heard will have access to a respectful and tolerant audience.
Given the leftward tilt of political allegiances on college campuses, that ambition has led, in some seasons, to offering proportionately more invitations to conservatives than to liberals. I stand by the choices I have made. But I do recognize that people on the left could reasonably argue that I have undermined any claim to political neutrality with a disproportionate attention to including conservative perspectives.
My compulsion to ensure that the silenced are heard emerged early in life. One memorable and instructive episode took place in my seventh-grade social studies class at Susan B. Coombs Junior High School in Banning, California.
While our teacher, Mr. Carter, was speaking to us, Danny Maxwell got up, walked to the wastebasket, and threw away a piece of paper. Evidently feeling that Danny had disrupted the class, Mr. Carter wrote his name down for detention.
Minutes before, I had committed exactly the same act of misbehavior. Danny, I felt, had been subject to injustice.
Danny stayed quiet, but I could not be a silent bystander to this injustice.
“Mr. Carter,” I said, “I just did the very same thing Danny did, and he got detention, and I did not.”
Called to action, Mr. Carter quickly remedied this injustice by adding my name to the detention list.
When I told my parents that I had to stay after school because I had taken a very high-ground stand for principle, I received a life lesson: I would have to work much harder to explain why principle sometimes required me to ask to be reprimanded.
But sitting for an hour in detention with the other bad behavers, I arrived at an even more consequential recognition: when I saw a situation where someone who should speak stayed silent, feeling certain he wouldn’t be heard, things might go better if I were in charge.
In the last quarter-century, I have had a cascade of opportunities to be in charge. In one particularly memorable adventure, I hosted Ronald Reagan’s first Secretary of the Interior James Watt, a historic figure who arouses strong feelings in Boulder. Just a month or two before Secretary Watt’s visit, a protester had thrown a cream pie at the Chancellor, a manner of conveying disagreement that is worth discussion at another time. So we could not be complacent or inattentive in planning for our upcoming visitor. Secretary Watt, if you should read this and learn this backstory for the first time, at every moment during your visit, I was ready to move fast and take the pie.
Readers might now be wondering: How did I acquire a determination to intercept a pie that could be (but blessedly was not) aimed at a nationally known conservative? How did “the creation of forums for the respectful exchange of ideas and perspectives” come to hold priority in the mission statement of the Center?
One crucial step in that process occurred in the Fall of 1969, when my professor (the historian and Tenth Mountain Division veteran, Page Smith) placed Lester Cappon’s edited collection of the Adams/Jefferson correspondence on his American history course syllabus.
The idea that the Founders of our democratic republic were a harmonic and unified group has recruited some believers, evidently people who have been scrupulous about never reading biographies of those Founders. The fracturing of the friendship of Federalist John Adams and Republican Thomas Jefferson is one of the best examples of the intensity of partisan disagreement in the early years of the nation. For a little more than a decade, they would not and did not communicate.
And then their mutual friend, Dr. Benjamin Rush, found this fracture beyond his bearing. Carrying messages of good will between the two men, he pled with them to reconcile. In his memorable words, “Fellow laborers in erecting the great fabric of American independence! . . . embrace—embrace each other!”
It worked.
“You and I ought not to die before We have explained ourselves to each other,” Adams wrote Jefferson soon after they returned to correspondence. Jefferson responded in wholehearted agreement.
Never meeting again in person, the two men corresponded for fourteen years, an exchange brought to a halt by the unfathomable synchronicity of their deaths on July 4, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
This correspondence, and the restoration of the friendship, would not have happened without Dr. Benjamin Rush taking the role of moderator and mediator.
And now for the question that has surely been on everyone’s mind: what on earth could I have meant by that weird phrase, “The Better Border Collies of Our Nation?”
For a couple of years in the 1990s, the Center’s Board had a custom of traveling to Meeker, Colorado, to attend the annual sheepdog trials. (Kathleen Sullivan and Reed Kelley, you have my unending gratitude for making that happen, and, of course, also for naming one of your calves after me.)
At the sheepdog trials, the handler signals the border collie to race to the far edge of the meadow and to return with a small flock of sheep, who have spent the summer on the open range, and who thereby have a very clear “Don’t Tread on Me!” attitude. The handler and the dog then work together to get the sheep to move through a set course, around fences and through gates.
Observing their defiance and persnickety-ness, a person cannot begin to figure out how sheep ever acquired a reputation as docile and compliant creatures. But sheepdogs do not have “give up” in their emotional toolkit, and canine determination eventually prevails.
Here is what I learned at Meeker and repeatedly confirmed at the National Western Stock Show. When individuals—who hold jobs that require them to persuade human beings to do something in a coordinated and collaborative way—watch a sheepdog at work, every single one of those individuals will soon exclaim, “I know exactly how that dog feels!” And then reminiscing takes over: “This reminds me of a class I had,” every teacher will say, “where I couldn’t get them even to show up having read the same book, much less having prepared for the discussion they knew I was planning.”
And now for the riddle: How is a sheepdog like a latter-day Benjamin Rush, the holder of a social role more commonly called moderator, or perhaps mediator?
Both the sheepdog and the moderator are trying to get defiant and recalcitrant creatures to do something together.
It is now important to state clearly that humans are not sheep, and sheep are not humans.
That is why the job of the sheepdog is so much harder than the job of the moderator.
The moderator has a wonderfully simple goal and measure of success: to get the people to come together and to pitch into “explaining themselves to each other.” Once that is achieved, even though the moderator must stay ready to intervene, more often than not, she is off-duty and free to enjoy the conversation.
But the sheepdog is never off-duty. There is always another fence or gate that the sheep must be directed to go around or through. There is always one sheep ready to make a sudden shift to the stance, “I am sick and tired of going around fences and through gates, and you can just count me out as a member of this stupid flock!”
Speaking of creatures who do not always go along with the flock, we return to the issue raised at the start of this essay: do I really think that it is my right to plead with President Donald J. Trump to live up to his declared faith in Christianity?
Yes, I do.
Why?
Because I am very worried about the governance of the nation that Adams, Jefferson, and their fellow citizens brought into being. And because I want to be able to continue to assure my students that ordinary citizens have a right to act, in my words, as “the better border collies of our nation,” and to encourage our leaders to stand with, in Abraham Lincoln’s considerably more resonant words, “the better angels of our nature.”
To understand my current forthrightness, everyone who has trusted the Center over the years has the right to hear a tale that I have not told to many people. Until now.
On the evening of Sunday February 9, I was on my way to attend a post-conference reception at the Byron R. White Club on campus. It had snowed during the day, and it was a cold night. Walking to the party, I hit—very literally!—the passageway between the stadium and the Folsom Fields Events Center. Since the passageway is roofed over, I assumed that it was ice-free, which was not a good assumption. Snow had melted, flowed over the concrete, and then frozen into a perfectly smooth sheet of ice.
I hit hard. I landed on my back, and my head hit the concrete. The chances of serious injury seemed vast: a fracture of the spine? Of a leg? A concussion, or a worse form of closed-head injury? Or at least a badly twisted ankle, or a deeply bruised hip?
None of the above.
I was fine.
Why?
I am an exercise nut, and my capacity to respond with resilience to a mishap is probably pretty good. But more important, I always carry a backpack, and the backpack absorbed some of the impact. Most important, the backpack moderated the intensity with which my head hit the concrete.
So I got up and went to the party.
In the time since February 9, I have been unable to think of my escape from injury as just lucky. I am increasingly at peace with the notion that a kind providence came to my rescue. Never exactly dormant, my sense of moral responsibility is even more invigorated.
Do I think that providence spared me injury so that I could invite President Donald J. Trump to become a better leader? I would be very hesitant to declare such a peculiar belief. Still, that proposition makes a lot more sense than a feeling of reverential and worshipful gratitude to my backpack for breaking my fall.
So here’s to more “forums for the respectful exchange of ideas and perspectives,” maybe even including one with a president who will be reached by a Benjamin-Rush equivalent, and decide that civility might be a better confirmation of his faith.
Photo Credit – Benjamin Rush photo courtesy of Wikipedia
Border Collie/Sheep photo courtesy of – U.S. Air Force photo (public domain) / R.J. Oriez)