Honoring Gerald R. Ford
The state funeral today for former President Gerald R. Ford was moving on so many levels. It was a superb celebration of a husband, father, naval officer, citizen and president. But nestled in with all the pomp and oratory was America’s remembrance that it is the person who rises from humble beginnings, who works hard for an education, answers duty’s call to defend freedom and serves his family and country with dignity that endures as one of the country’s most noble symbols.
This was a ceremony in which common men and woman saluted a common man amongst them. In that, it was an affirmation that America is fundamentally a society about the lives, abilities and accomplishments of ordinary people, not aristocracies or an anointed class. This is why governance, and the duty to hold accountable those entrusted with power, is so pivotal in America. It is why there has been a sense of revulsion over the excesses and scandals that have come to epitomize the boardrooms and political halls of the nation.
The ceremony honoring President Ford came, like the arrival of the man himself upon the nation’s highest office, at just the right time, when America and its friends needed to have their attention shone upon a quieter kind of leadership. Gerald Ford was among that unique generation of individuals who managed to change the world one day and change the diapers of their children the next. It was a commemoration of the attributes of the greatest generation that did so much to preserve freedom and rebuild a modern economy and for the most part still remained unassuming in the way they lived their lives. They were the heroes next door.
The passing of Gerry Ford and the great gathering of respect and admiration that came to mark his life today serves as a signal that something has been missing in the style and values of the movers and shakers of the post war generation of which I am a part, and a reminder that we could do a lot worse than strive to recapture the virtues our parents taught us.
It is, for me at least, a fitting note upon which to begin the work of a new year.