Since Harvard's in the Headlines...
When I graduated from Harvard, I had a lovely boyfriend—and he wanted to travel the world with me. I’d saved up for this trip by working, in the wee hours of the morning, at a place called The Air Charter Guide. There, I used my terrible German and even worse French to call European owners of small aircraft and log their details into a global database of rentable planes. It was weird work, but it paid better than my previous gigs shelving books, cleaning dorms, and selling pastries—and by this day, 34 years ago, I’d saved enough to travel for nearly a year.
As we discussed life after graduation, I surprised both the lovely boyfriend and myself by telling him that I needed to travel solo—that it was important to me to see the world through my own eyes.
Eduard Shevardnadze, Gorbachev’s Foreign Minister, was our commencement speaker. In the middle of his address, I burst into tears—confusing my roommates, who had lived with me for four whole years without knowing how deeply I felt about—apparently—the dissolution of the Soviet Union?
In fact, I was not listening to Mr. Shevardnadze at all. In that moment, it had just struck me that my time in that extraordinary place, with such wonderful people, was over.
It was the right call, though, to go traveling alone. I had space to hear myself think.
Decades later, I’m still struck by how difficult it can be, just to know what one believes. For me, arriving at real conviction requires lots of banging around in the real world, reading as much as I can, writing drafts that go nowhere, and rigorous debate—ideally with other people, but also with myself. Assembling a coherent worldview feels to me like building a good sandcastle: painstaking work that lasts only until the next tide. Still, I keep at it: to know how to vote, what to work on—how to, um, live.
One thing I wish my weepy 21-year-old self had known that day is this: extraordinary communities with wonderful people exist all over. You just have to find them—or create them. Over the years, I’ve found or forged deep connections in many places—at work, online, in the neighborhood. It doesn’t matter where someone went to college. It doesn’t matter if they went to college. What matters, I’ve found, is how serious they are—and how curious they are—about building a better sandcastle.
At our first Zoom last month, 18 of you showed up with your proverbial buckets and spades. I enjoyed that time together, and I’m looking forward to meeting again on Monday. Feel free to bring your own topics, but to get us started, here’s something I’ve been puzzling over: Why is the party that purportedly loves facts being so hard on truth tellers? Two examples:
David Hogg. I know he’s pissing a lot of people off, but for me he captured what went wrong in 2024 pretty succinctly: “Voters told us Biden was too old, and prices were too high. Democrats said, ‘No he’s not, and no they’re not,’ and then a few months later: ‘Okay he is, but look at this GDP graph.’”
Jake Tapper. Tapper is also in the Democratic doghouse right now, but I for one really appreciated Original Sin, the book he co-wrote with Alex Thompson. What I found knocking on doors in Pennsylvania last fall—the doors of thousands of registeredDemocrats—was a profound lack of trust in all politicians. If we aren’t looking squarely at the failures and lies that kept so many potential voters at home, what the heck are we doing?
Please email me if you need the link for Monday. I look forward to chatting!
Kate
