This week’s selected media, June 2025: Thomas Jefferson and The Choice
This week I finished:
Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power, by Jon Meacham: I’d been seeing lately how much the pattern today of
- Saying all the right things about freedom, liberty, and values we support
- Saying others should act by those values, in fact all of society
- But not living by those values ourselves
- Even though we could
- Claiming, against clear, incontrovertible evidence, that we can’t
repeats how Thomas Jefferson lived.
Today, people recognize his flaws. We wish that on slavery he had acted differently. We wish he had, as a politician, acted more to end slavery. We wish he had freed his slaves. We recognize that his personal actions caused internal conflict that inhibited him from acting politically.
If I was going to talk about Jefferson, I’d better learn more about him. Why not from a Pulitzer Prize-winning author in a number one bestselling book?
This book we thorough, thoughtful, and engaging. It delivered on presenting Jefferson in many lights, including as a slaveholder acting against his own values, enslaving his own children.
If you believe Jefferson should have and could have acted against his violations of his own values, I content that you will find your life improve by living by your values. You don’t live sustainably, so your lifestyle hurts others’ life, liberty, and property.
He could have acted more. You can too. His most effective action would have been to lead others. You too could lead others to pollute and deplete less and decrease plunder and imperialism.
Corrie Ten Boom: A Faith Undefeated: In the book I finished last week, The Choice, the author, Dr. Eger mentioned Corrie Ten Boom. I hadn’t heard of her. I found this documentary on her.
She was a Dutch Christian woman who could have watched the Nazis after they invaded Holland, where she lived, and done nothing. Instead, she and her family helped many Jews at great personal risk, including hosting them in hidden rooms in their homes.
An informant outed them. She and other family members were put in concentration camps. Several died. She survived and spent the rest of her life making known what happened.
She also explored forgiveness, including of the informant whose actions led to her family members’ deaths and a guard who tortured her sister.
We today can learn from people like her and her family. People today consider not flying tantamount to not living. They treat it as the only way to learn of other cultures. We don’t have to risk death not to order takeout or fly at our whim, but can explore other cultures simply by not hurting people through polluting and depleting.
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