A Governor Cries in the ARCO Forum

You may not have been there this past Monday night when former New York Governor Mario Cuomo came to speak at the Kennedy School of Government. But the lucky 1500 or so Harvard affiliates and Boston residents who came to hear had the rare privilege of seeing Mario Cuomo cry--twice.

Yes, Mario Cuomo, the longest-serving governor of New York in modern history, stood in front of 1500 people and cried twice. Not bawling out loud, of course. A person who held the same office held by both presidential Roosevelts tends to make an effort to avoid sobbing during a speech. But the tears in his eyes and in his voice were obvious twice, visible and audible even in the adjacent rooms on Simulcast. No matter what you might think of Cuomo, or even if you couldn't care less about Cuomo, you have to admit that it's kind of strange to see someone crying in the ARCO Forum--especially when that person is the keynote speaker. And it's worth taking a minute, especially if you missed his speech, to see what he was crying about.

Cuomo spoke about how America has abandoned its poorest citizens. He evoked for his audience the much-vaunted 40 million working Americans who don't have health insurance, along with the millions of schoolchildren subsisting on a sub-par education, in an era when we are faced with not only a booming economy but an actual budget surplus, an era when prosperity should have rendered these problems moot. Nothing in his speech was new; none of his statistics were shocking. Democrats in the audience surely agreed with most of Cuomo's ideas; Republicans, predictably, would have loved to debate him. But the crux of Cuomo's speech was nonpartisan and unpredictable indeed, because what Cuomo wanted to talk about was not government but redemption.

Perhaps what America needs, Cuomo suggested, is some kind of hero, a redemptive figure who would emerge onto the American scene and bring us the solutions that seem just outside our grasp. "Moses," he mused, "maybe if Moses came back...even Alan Simpson here wouldn't argue with Moses."

Ultimately, though, Cuomo's verdict on heroism was more negative. "I don't think we can have heroes anymore," he told his audience. "The ground is too hard for heroes to grow." The audience was then left to ask itself: Where have all the heroes gone? And why can't we, at one of the centers of our great nation's power, generate more of them? Many of us students think that we ourselves are the seeds of future heroes. In truth, we are actually part of the hard-packed ground. We are either too cynical to believe that real future heroes can exist, or we are too arrogant to believe that such heroes can or should be someone other than ourselves. And that leaves too many people clamoring to be heroes and too few people believing in them.

More than one potential hero has been crushed by the crowd of pretenders to the throne. They get shoved aside in political primaries, dumped in the circular file at the offices of various publication, passed up for professorships and passed over for jobs. And the "heroes" who do make it, or at least the pretenders to that title, have been installed as our role models--at the expense of people who excel primarily at softening that ground. Our professors are leaders in their fields first, teachers of their craft second. The Kennedy School itself is staffed almost entirely via the political revolving door.

Even after Cuomo's speech, his listeners couldn't help but feel the need to search for those future heroes--or to dream of becoming them. During the question-and-answer period, more than half the questioners disregarded the content of Cuomo's speech entirely, asking him instead about his predictions for future candidates for office. Leaving the auditorium, students asked each other whether they planned on going into politics. One student, quoted in this newspaper, expressed the feelings of many when she confided that the speech made her "want to go out and do something." But do what?

The problem with heroism is that it can't be grown hydroponically. Heroes do not sprout through training programs. They do not blossom through a series of interviews or bloom from an advanced degree program. Instead, heroes emerge out of circumstances that call for heroism. They are often the people from whom we expect the least, the people who shock us by rising to the occasion. True heroism exists only in times of crisis.

Cuomo cautioned that we cannot expect heroes to arise on their own. But that doesn't mean that heroism lies beyond our grasp. It simply means that we should be willing NOT to be heroes, to acknowledge that our most exalted role might lie, instead, in softening the ground so that future heroes will have a place to grow. When they hear that Cuomo came to Harvard to speak about "the liberal agenda," too many people probably assumed that they had heard it all before, and that if it was all old news, who needed it? Those people, no matter what their political opinions might be, come from the same part of the body politic: the jaded part. But those weren't the people who saw the former governor of New York cry, twice.

The world needs heroes, certainly. But it also needs teachers, parents, lovers, dreamers--people who will nourish those heroes, and, more importantly, people who will believe in them when they actually appear.

Cuomo is right. The ground today is too hard for heroes. But if more people are willing to cry for their ideas in the ARCO Forum, perhaps their tears will soften the ground.

Dara Horn '99 is a literature concentrator in Eliot House. Her column appears on alternate Thursdays.