AMY GOODMAN: Ralph Nader, at the same time that An Unreasonable Man has been released, you have a new small book out called The Seventeen Traditions, which is different from the other books that you have written. It's very much about your family life, how you grew up in Winsted, Connecticut. Can you talk about what the seventeen traditions are?
RALPH NADER: Well, there are seventeen ways my mother and father raised their four children -- two girls and two boys -- in this factory town crossed by two rivers and highlighted by a wonderful lake in northwest Connecticut. And I call them "traditions," because I would like to encourage other families to look into their own wisdom and insight and experience in their generation line -- say, grandparents and great aunts and uncles and parents -- because if those traditions are lost, they're lost forever, and they're not transferred to young people who often are adrift in periods of change. So, we have the tradition of learning, was the first one in the book. My mother said you have to learn to listen, and if you learn to listen, then you'll listen and learn, something I wish George Bush was raised to do. We have a tradition of history. They would always immerse us in history at the dinner table, and we'd have books about history. So, we have stamp collections to teach us geography. Then there are traditions of charity, traditions of business. My father had a restaurant, where they said for a nickel you got a cup of coffee and ten minutes of politics. So it was a big restaurant with a lot of politics from the workers in the textile mills, of the jurors on the lunch break from the courtroom, and salespeople and doctors and carpenters, you name it. Traditions like the tradition of scarcity; they never overloaded us with things so we wouldn't appreciate them. There was a tradition of simple enjoyments, not commercial enjoyments today, like a $100 Nintendo toy. We had bicycles. We had puzzles. We had hiking in the woods and the fields, etc. There were tradition of civics. We watched our parents, while they took us to the town meetings and the courtroom. But we watched them active in the community and absorbed that kind of family value. Civic values, they saw, were family values. And so, there were these kinds of traditions of health, for example, and teaching us to take care of ourselves. These are the traditions that raised us. The other day, watching George W. Bush, it occurred to me that if mother raised George W. Bush, we wouldn't be in the Iraq war at the present time. AMY GOODMAN: Both your parents were born in Lebanon? RALPH NADER: Yes. AMY GOODMAN: And you went back to Lebanon with your brothers and sisters when you were little? Your mother took you there for about a year? RALPH NADER: Yes. I was about three and a half. AMY GOODMAN: And how does that influence your worldview today? RALPH NADER: Well, obviously, it gave us a bigger arc of concern and interest in the world. I mean, we went to the ancient ruins in Baalbek in Lebanon. We obviously were immersed in the culture there. We learned the language. We learned the lore of our background, our great great grandparents. You know, there was an oral tradition there. We learned how to ride donkeys, too. AMY GOODMAN: The bombing of Lebanon this past summer and the Iraq war, what does your being an Arab American -- how do you feel that informs your view? RALPH NADER: Well, you don't have to be an Arab American. You just have to be interested in understanding historical precedence. For example, Iran's prime minister was overthrown by our country in 1953. The US government under Reagan encouraged and supplied Saddam Hussein with the materials to invade Iran and slice it off for -- part of it off for Iraq. We have labeled Iran an axis of evil. That has a tremendous impact, especially since we did it to Iraq and invaded them next door, has a tremendous impact on a proud Persian history. I mean, there was a time when they were the dominant force in the world, and they remember those things. And they feel humiliated. George W. Bush came to the presidency. I think he had been abroad once or twice. He didn't know anything about world history. And he was proud of saying he didn't read newspapers. He was proud of his ignorance. And we're paying the price for that. It's not just his obsession. It's not just his messianic militarism. It's his profound ignorance. AMY GOODMAN: Ralph Nader, your father used to ask you, "What did you learn in school today?" RALPH NADER: Yeah. One day I went home and in the backyard, and he said, "Ralph, what did you learn in school today? Did you learn how to believe or did you learn how to think?" Another event I remember in the backyard -- a beautiful spring day, my parents were there with my siblings -- and my mother said, "How much is a dozen eggs?" We knew all the prices, because we were restauranteurs' children. And so, she said, "How much is a bushel of apples? How much is a pound of butter?" And then she stopped and she looked up, and she said, "Nice cool breeze, isn't it? How much is that? What's that sunshine worth? Look at those birds. Hear those birds singing those beautiful songs. What price should we put on that?" That really at an early age taught me that there are certain things that should be never for sale. And that's, in our democracy, elections should never be for sale. Politicians should never be for sale. Teachers should never be for sale. So, from those seventeen traditions, I developed a linkage with the civic advocacy and things that I wrote and spoke about as an adult. And I think that people are very interested in this book, because it's personal, it has good stories about life in New England at that time, which will resonate with parents and children in terms of their own recollections. I think people have to recollect more. They have to rebuild the solidarity of their family line in a period of great tumult and change, when they think that everything is out of control around their lives, their jobs and their children. full: http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/02/05/1532248
