Matt Fowler: Personal Thoughts

Lincoln’s Second Inaugural, six weeks before his death. No malice. Charity for all. Firmness in the right. It’s the hardest balance there is, and the only one worth pursuing. The same sentence goes on to promise “to care for him who shall have borne the battle,” words the VA has carried as its motto for decades. On Veterans Day, that’s the part of the work we can all help finish.

Spinoza was excommunicated at 23 for thinking too freely and spent his life grinding lenses rather than recant. This was his whole method: understanding before judgment. It’s harder than it sounds, and nearly everything decent depends on it.

Hand said this to newly sworn citizens in Central Park in 1944, with the war’s outcome still in doubt. The deepest form of liberty isn’t certainty; it’s the humility to question yourself. Worth remembering on the eve of an election. That was part of what was being defended.

Ingersoll was the most famous orator in America and almost no one remembers him now. This is the whole of a decent society in one line—the rights you want mean nothing unless you extend them to everyone else.

Twain wrote this at the end of The Innocents Abroad, after five months at sea with a shipload of Americans who mostly went looking for home.

Addams moved into a run-down mansion on Chicago’s West Side in 1889 and stayed the rest of her life. Hull House was built on this idea: the good you keep to yourself is the fragile kind. It only holds once your neighbors have it too. It’s the argument I keep coming back to on housing.