LETTERS TO MIKEY
Forward (published date April 2022)
Unlocking your full potential (For early readers and teens.)
The Mikey Man
Michael James Cort, otherwise known as the Mikey Man, was born on July 24, 2003, and is the youngest of my three kids. The other day was his 18th birthday, and in a few weeks, he will be going off to college and officially turning me into what they call an “empty nester”. Ever since I can remember, I’ve written a letter to Mikey on his birthday. We‘ve been exchanging letters ever since he was old enough to read and write. This year was a particularly important one with his birthday, high school graduation, and him going off to college. The pressure on me to deliver this time around was off the charts. If I didn’t get a few happy tears with my letter this year, the Mikey Man would surely think that Dad was off his game, and we couldn’t have that… So, I dug in!
My emotions ran high as my mind searched as deeply as it ever had for the right fatherly advice. Then it happened. Hours turned into days. I couldn’t stop trying to help the Mikey man, to lift him at this particular time. One page streamed into the next and as his birthday approached I realized that I had a major problem on my hands. How would I tell Mikey that I can’t give him his letter this year because I decided to write a book?!
Then in a single moment on his birthday, without my letter in hand, I read these words to him:
“Mikey, I love you beyond words. Of all the fatherly advice and greatest wisdom, I will ever convey to you is that we are placed in this world to be a part of a greater connected community. What ultimately fulfills a man (or woman) and makes us happy is when we are striving to bring people together as one. We can’t create happiness and peace for ourselves when there is so much unrest and unhappiness across our street or elsewhere in our world. You may never know exactly when or how your talents will impact society’s great need, but they will if you embrace life’s challenges head-on. Be patient, for you are only human, and there are no perfect human beings. The journey is not always easy, but if we maintain our natural born character traits of kindness, empathy, and compassion for other people above all else, a most wonderful and fulfilling life will unfold in front of you.”
Mikey, the secrets to your enjoyment of life, and your generation living with harmony, free of hate and terrible disagreement, are way too complex to summarize, ... but you know me, my man, I am going to try.
Here goes.
Introduction
Over the 52 years of my life, I’ve felt a few powerful impulses I do not know where they came from or what was behind them. They were just there, and I followed them without knowing why. Some of my impulses have put me on the brink of death, and others have propelled me to freedom beyond my wildest dreams. The current motivating force gripping me is rooted in a single sentiment; which is to say, to my young readers, that I care about you - deeply. More importantly is for you to know that you are surrounded by more caring, decent, and helpful people than you realize. There are millions of people who have the correct sense to help guide you at this important time in your life. However, you wouldn’t necessarily know that given the way many of us “grown-ups” have been acting in the last few years.
As young people, you‘ve had to live through the Trump years, Covid 19, “BLM”, “Stop Asian Hate”, “Defund the Police”, “Critical Race Theory”, “me too”, “Karen’s” and “Proud Boys” just to name just a few of our “political issues”-” an important subject that people are arguing about or discussing”. Please note this book is written for early readers and teenagers for the most part, so when I choose to use words that I believe are important or powerful, or a little “big” for your age group I will place them in italics and provide a definition right there and then.
It’s hard to describe the political confusion you are living with, except to say that “it” is so bad that you know exactly what I’m talking about. A lot of people have seemingly jumped off the “normal bus” a few stops too early. . ..and these people are supposed to be leading us forward right? Not all the issues are bad in and of themselves, except for Covid, “Karyn’s” and “Proud Boys” of course. . . but the time for jokes about this stuff is over. The alarm is ringing. People being so angry and divided (seemingly more so than ever before) is taking a toll on your generation . . . you have told me so.
In the winter of 2020, I spent a semester teaching a course on technology in construction to high school seniors in Boston. I could tell that my students were down in the dumps from the effects of COVID-19 as our fall outdoor classes turned into online “Zoom” events. It seemed like the more technology we used to stay connected, the further we grew apart. I was sad to feel the opportunity to make long-term relationships slipping away. What I remember most is my students telling me, as they shook their weary heads left to right . . . “things are just so messed up out there.” What they were experiencing was a whole lot more than Covid.
That spring, I spent time speaking to many of Mikey’s friends at their high school graduation events and most expressed a similar lack of optimism about our country and a sense of worry about their future. I began to learn from those that I spoke with, that your concern was mostly with our government. When I asked the meaning of the word “politics'' - “the activities associated with the governance of a country or area”, most responses I received were singular words such as violence, hate, and division. I don't recall anyone being proud of our country. As I ventured into Mikey’s nephews, cousins, and their friends who are pre-teens, my worst fears were coming home to roost. Too many of you are questioning the goodness of the world around you and are feeling lonely, isolated, or worse. I’m not going to bore you with statistics when again, you know better than I what you are feeling.
I take your words as a wake-up call. We have walked on unstable ground for too long! We need to cut through the “nonsense”- “foolish or unacceptable behavior,” reestablish clear differences between right and wrong, and regain our sense of confidence in ourselves and our country. While the America you live in today may have reached a low point, it doesn’t need to be the America you wake up in tomorrow. The truth is that when it comes to our government and politics, you’ve just been through an “aberration” (“a departure from what is normal, usual or expected, typically one that is unwelcome”) What you have been witnessing in the last few years should be unwelcome in any normal world. What you need to know right now is that voices of reason will overcome and triumph, they always have and always will! There are many people out there like me who are sorry to see this happening. We understand the root causes of how we got here and together we have the tools to help your generation see things for what they truly are and for what they can be. The fact is that you can grow up in a country that you love and a city or town where you feel like you belong, where you can trust your elected officials instead of making fun of them.
Debate in this country can be “civil” - “formal politeness and courtesy in behavior or speech” and even enjoyable! This is what I experienced when I practiced law at the Massachusetts Attorney General’s office and as a young Assistant District Attorney in Boston during the 1990s. Good people disagreed often, but we always did so with “dignity” -” the state of being honorable” and “respect” -” due regard for feelings, wishes, rights or traditions of another”. In my 27 years in business, I have worked with people of all different backgrounds and opposing opinions, and I have found most are committed to solving problems for the betterment of everyone. You will find this same thing in your life. It may seem hard to believe right now, but there are tons of reasons for you to be optimistic about our country and your future. Exploring why this is true and how you accomplish it, is what this book is all about.
Great American poet Robert Frost said, “Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or self-confidence”. There will always be disagreement between people, in some form, we can’t change that, but what if we could educate all people to, (at the very minimum) share a sort of “Morality Code” when it comes to how we interact with one another? What if we could teach everyone to communicate with common courtesy so that we could disagree without being disagreeable or rude; so, we wouldn't talk down to each other? Wouldn’t that make the world a nicer place to be? We will define this “code” together as a goal of the book and make every effort to achieve it.
I have long held a theory about life and people. It goes like this: 90% of people, at any given moment, can help us achieve our societal goals. The fact is that in real life if you got in a room with someone whom you thought you disagreed with, in most cases you would leave that room respecting and even liking the other person - even if you remained competitors. I have found that the vast majority of people hold enough belief in common, and can communicate well enough, to contribute to our “society”. - “people living together in a more or less ordered community”.
This means of course that only about 10% of us currently lack these abilities. These “10%ers” as I will refer to them, throughout the book, either failed to acquire enough of the “code”, or more likely they simply lost it along their journey. “Morality” is defined as “the principles concerning the distinction between right and wrong or good and bad behaviors”. We all have our moments, so it may not be possible to get everyone to behave as we would like all the time. However, there is a flame of good in all of us. As we learn how to respect what people are going through and ratchet up certain skills as human beings, (first individually, then together as a society) we can turn things around and in time achieve very lofty goals. These 10 %ers are mostly all much older than you are, which presents us with an amazing opportunity. Much more on this later…
It’s been a year now since I sat down to write my letter to Mikey. My impulse began out of love for my son, it was purely emotional, so I wasn’t planning on doing a ton of research to support my theories… but that changed. I found some time to sell my business and moved to an island – literally- to research my thoughts. I read dozens upon dozens of books, starting with the “ancient” (old) stuff, like Socrates, Aristotle, Shakespeare, and Cicero! (I love the word Cicero so much that I will refer to all smart philosophers as the Ciceros of the World) I wanted to re-open my mind to all kinds of things after spending so many years focused mainly on business. I found most of the books very long and boring with a lot of huge words that I couldn’t understand. So I began to use the Siri App on my phone to define terms, (which I do throughout the book) it made my search for meaning easier.
The more I read, the more I felt alive! I was having a revelation of sorts, I couldn’t believe how the books were saying the same thing! When it comes to our knowledge about what “values”- “a person's principles or standards of behavior; one's judgment of what is important in life” and morals are needed in people to get along with one another, we humans know our “shit”! The similarity of expert opinion in both the old and newest literature, spanning hundreds of years, if not thousands, was undeniable. And it's not just our ability to get along, it's our understanding of happiness as well. There are certain ways of thinking and acting that cause us to grow “character”, which as it turns out is the essence of success. Our most well-respected leaders in history all shared certain behaviors and attributes.. which continue to dominate the teachings of today. There is also vast agreement that these behaviors can be learned rather easily, and maintained with practice.
You can only imagine how excited I was. Picture me in my bathrobe, books piled up at my side, my scruff now grown into a full beard and my dog Gracie looking up at me with head turned - I was jumping for joy! In a world where everyone has been questioning up from down, left from right, and good from evil, I RE-learned what I had simply set out to tell my son Mikey - there is right from wrong when it comes to how to behave! However, it wasn’t a moment after this rediscovery that I had a sinking feeling. My forehead tightened…( I think I saw it on Gracie’s face too) I thought to myself; If being a moral person is so well-established then why are so many people behaving so badly? Why aren’t all these fantastic books working?!
The answers to this question are no doubt complex but they are not out of our reach. We can’t fix our problems if we are not honest about how we got here. For example, Donald Trump's presidency, and how the internet and social media work today is a combination that caused a lot of damage. But we only become a part of the problem if we criticize Mr. Trump or any person for that matter. We are done following the script that got us into this mess. We don't get anywhere by putting people down. I will simply point out how his years in office ended with an attack on our nation's capital, and we will study how that happened so you can stop it from ever occurring again.
I also aim to “enlighten”-“give (someone) greater knowledge about a subject or situation” Mr. Trump as I hear he may run for President again. Therefore in Chapter _____ I have a pretend “conversation” with “The Donald” (I believe he likes this term) where I ask him to help us meet our goal, which is to end violence and hate forever. It's also provided as an example of how to communicate with someone with whom we want to influence to change. So you get a double whammy education in this chapter.
Along the way, I cover the importance of being “centered”-” placed or situated in the center ''. There are great benefits of working to find the middle of two opposite extremes, particularly when it comes to getting along with other people. Moderation is a hugely underrated virtue. It becomes a theme of the book. I ask you to weave it into your life story. What I would love for you to take away, is that there is a time and a place for everything; acting “theatrical”- “dramatic . . . excessively emotional” or “eccentric”-” unconventional and slightly strange” works well in your social life I encourage it! If you are in the middle of the woods with your friends, go nuts, be weird and wild - have fun. But in governmental and business settings it doesn't work. In life, to have success, there is a certain way to behave depending on the situation. For example, In business, as in government, when leaders make it normal, to be carefree, casual, and loose with facts, (as the Donald unfortunately did, knowingly or not) they call into question truth, which is the foundation that a civilized society stands upon. When we remove truth, distrust of our fellow man follows. Today, in America, we are arguing about obvious things, such as if Elmo is red or blue, or if the world is flat. Reliable, and reassuring standards that used to weave us together have become twisted out of shape. This is what leads to “hate”- “feeling intense or passionate dislike for someone”. The media fuels the fire (a terrible problem that needs to be curtailed). People today blame their political enemies in generalizations like a sport and are not thinking about the damage they are doing. It has led to what I would call an “epidemic” of anger. (“epidemic -a widespread occurrence of an infectious disease in a community at a particular time”) The FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigations) reported more hate crimes in America in 2020 than in any prior year in the history of our country. *
So we need to stop doing this stuff. We also need to stop blaming each other and get to work on healing. With this book and follow-up effort, we will convince our current politicians that virtues such as consistency, humility, decency, and the granddaddy of them all. . . “selflessness”-” concern more with the needs and wishes of others, than one's own” are required traits in our leaders.
My mission is to bond everyone together through education and the re-establishment of common truths. I realize it won't be easy but education can make miracles happen and this is the single largest reason we should be optimistic about our future together. The truths that follow in the pages ahead will be tried and tested, but they have and will forever continue to prove themselves to be everlasting. Many of the truths are about our human nature - which we all share. A deeper understanding of our human nature will help all of us live up to our highest “ideals”-“satisfying one's conception of what is perfect; most suitable” as individuals and as a society. We can all become healers and beacons of hope - maybe even a few of us old farts!
There will always be a few people who try to deprive us of the formation of shared truth and who seek to tear us apart. But it is OK, we are more than ready, and prepared to handle them. We are an advanced society, capable of rejecting distortions of reality. Like our weatherman on TV, who can predict when a storm is coming based on conditions in the atmosphere. Similarly, we know what causes people to become this way; angry, “self-righteous” (a big term discussed later), and dead set on interfering with the type of peace you want to see in the world. But we do not have to let them pull us down. Instead, we are going to lift them!
There is a reason why our government withstood the attack by a few people on our Capitol on January 6th,2021. The “90%ers” “prevailed”- “prove more powerful than opposing forces; be victorious”. But the government is complex - I admit. People get bent out of shape for good reason. Author William Damon describes the challenges of an organized government this way: “How should the world’s resources be allocated… How should we balance the rights of someone who has earned something against the rights of someone who may need it more? These are problems . . . on a grand scale, and despite centuries of debate have eluded resolution”. * If we simply blame the rioters, we grow further apart from them. We can’t just turn a blind eye to people with whom we disagree. But it requires work. Right now, people are dug in. Their personal goals and mission are solidly attached to their hearts and minds. But they were wrong to express their frustration with violence, climbing the walls of the Capitol building and killing a police officer.
There is great progress being made outside of the pages of this book, to improve what we teach in schools, about government, and how to get your point across peacefully, in the face of adversity. The very definition of one’s character and integrity should be measured on their ability to get along with those with whom they disagree. Instead of just cramming definitions and dates in preparation for the big exam, we are beginning to teach you more about the things that matter most such as why and how to be a good citizen, first. At the end of the book, I added a section called “For Adults”, to help “coalesce”- “come together to form one mass or whole”, parents, and teachers, around what I have named a morality movement. I even bought the URL, www.moralitymovement.com. I hope you will help me populate it.
In closing, we seem to set aside our differences in our looks, race, color, or opinions in so many areas of our lives together. We have great success in our Pop culture (I think about how everyone loves the Superbowl halftime shows as an example), and in team sports, we get along regardless of our age, religion, or skin color. Yet we continue to distrust our politicians (the very people who lead us) and these “political issues” keep us divided. If not improved, these conditions will continue to cast a dark cloud over your future. We can't have that.
Any advice book worth reading, especially one that attempts to answer such hard questions needs to have its serious moments, but I promise I will try to keep things appropriate for your age group. You’ve been through a lot and being a teenager is a difficult several years of life. My goal is to place a few of the golden nuggets of knowledge directly on your tongue and make it easy to digest. Like dodging the line at Chix Filet! I set out to write a simple pep talk to my kid, and I want it to read like that. One of my main goals is to make you smile and laugh.
If many of you engage in the materials in this book your generation can reach unbelievable heights. You are simply stronger and more capable than you think (proof follows). By regaining your trust in the good of the human spirit, and in our country, I believe your generation can free us of anger and violence forever! These aren’t false promises. It’s possible.
Let's start a movement, by tapping into our greatest resource - YOU! Thank you for reading.
Now “Lets GOOOHHHH!!!”