Sundown at Campobello
As we near the end of campaign 2024, is compassion on the ballot?
About a century ago, a struggling man stricken with polio during a summer at his family’s retreat on Campobello Island, was encouraged to run for political office. His mother would have none of it, considering that politics was too plebeian a calling. His wife, the encourager, convinced him ‘now is the time.’ Navigating his and a country’s ailments and America’s place on the world stage, the man became one of the most effective political leaders in American history, developing in the citizenry, compassion as a political weapon for social progress. His wife, a widow at 61, continued the arc of compassion they had constructed together, establishing human rights as a global mission.
As we near the end of campaign 2024, will ‘compassion’ remain on the ballot?
The photograph, “Migrant Mother, Nipomo California, 1936,” by Dorothea Lange, belongs in the Oval Office, next to the Childe Hassam painting “The Avenue in the Rain,” (1917) and the Remington statue “Bronco Buster” (1895). The photograph conveys a nobleness, etched from poverty, hers and other photographs chronicled during the Depression. Indeed, the birth of photojournalism provided America’s wakeup call that we all suffer when a few are left out. The notion, captured in the photograph, that we can summon our notion of equality and mix…
