Shortest Way Home: One Mayor's Challenge and a Model for America's Future

by Pete Buttigieg

Chasten and I now live on the same block as Mom and Dad, and the mortgage payment on our large old house facing the river comes to about four hundred and fifty bucks.

A letter on your pillow had a list of everyone who had ever lived in your room, which in my case included Ulysses Grant Jr., Cornel West, and Horatio

The top priority of the terrorist—even more important than killing you—is to make himself your top priority.

We all want to avoid being harmed—but if the cost of doing so is making the terrorist the thing you care about most, to the exclusion of the other things that matter in your society, then you have handed him exactly the kind of victory that makes terrorism such a frequent and successful tactic.

The summer of 2005 saw me back in an actual classroom, this time in Tunis, where a highly affordable language program gave me the chance to improve my Arabic.

Rhodes Scholarship took me to Oxford for two years in large halls and small professors’ rooms in the ancient colleges learning philosophy, politics, and economics.

I was forced to learn the British tradition of analytical philosophy, which breaks down the meaning of the words we throw around casually yet with conviction in debates about ethics and politics, sometimes without knowing what we are talking about.

became famous for creating a new definition of justice, which boils down to this: a society is fair if it looks like something we would design before knowing how we would come into the world.

This vision of justice is often compared to being asked how you would want a cake to be divided if you did not know which piece will be yours: equally, of course.

Indeed, even the most orthodox economic theories showed that market failures were all but guaranteed to occur in situations, like health care and education delivery, where a seller has power over a buyer, or a buyer is seeking a service that can’t easily be assigned a dollar value, or the seller

and the buyer have different levels of information about the product.

Healthcare

I had finished with a “First,” the highest grade in their remarkably simple (and very British) system of First, Second Upper, Second Lower, and Third Class degrees.

I realized with overwhelming clarity the reason this could not be a career for very long: I didn’t care.

For purpose-driven people, this is the conundrum of client-service work: to perform at your best, you must learn how to care about something because you are hired to do so. For some, this is not a problem at all. A great lawyer or consultant can identify so closely with the client, or so strongly desire to be good at the job, or be so well compensated, that her purposes and interests and those of the client become one. But for others, work can only be meaningful if its fundamental purpose is in things that would matter even if no one would pay you to care about them.

If there’s a child on the South Side of Chicago that can’t read, that makes a difference in my life even if it’s not my child. If there’s a senior citizen on the West Side of Chicago who can’t afford

her prescription medicine . . . that makes my life poorer even if it’s not my grandparent.

The proportion of members of Congress who were veterans had fallen from 70 percent in 1969 to 25 in 2004, and fewer than 2

percent of members of Congress had a child who was serving.

After estimating that predatory lending in our area costs low-income South Bend residents $3.5 million a year, he gathered some interested friends to launch a micro-lending nonprofit called JIFFI. Working to create alternatives to check-cashing lenders, the organization continues to serve residents on our West Side.

Look into JIFFI

I read about how World War I ended at eleven in the morning on November 11, 1918. The armistice was signed at five in the morning, but set to take effect at eleven. In those six hours, there were thousands of casualties. An American soldier was killed at 10:59 after he decided to use the last sixty seconds of the war to charge a German position. If the armistice had been agreed on the tenth of November, or the twelfth, would anyone have bothered to set a time instead of letting it take immediate effect? Did the negotiators place any weight on the loss of life required for their tidy numerology?

“Life is short, and we do not have much time to gladden the hearts of those who travel with us; so be quick to love, make haste to be kind, and go in peace to follow the good road of blessing.”

It was another way of looking at the moral stakes of politics as it filters through to millions of lives: that we might all be growing into harder and perhaps worse people, as a consequence of political leadership that failed to call us to our highest values.