An Open Letter to Mark Zuckerberg: Please Save America

Dear Mr. Zuckerberg:

I am writing to you, with complete sincerity, because the disintegration of our national dialogue has left me feeling burned out. One defining feature of burnout—a major focus of this blog—is that a person feels that his or her work is meaningless. I always believed that although I wasn’t a household name, much of my work did have meaning to many. What scares me now, and why I’m writing to you, is because if the bifurcation of our nation into Liberal versus Conservative camps continues apace, very few people will be able to do any sort of work that matters. I am convinced that America is much closer to Civil War II than a simultaneous singing of Kumbaya, a fact that concerns me no end. I cannot, alone, do squat to ameliorate this situation, which is why I hope to convince you to join me in an effort to bridge the divide between Liberals and Conservatives in America today.

Why you and not some other super-successful entrepreneur who can afford to fund this initiative? Two reasons:

1. First and foremost, your investor relations FAQ sheet states, “…Facebook's mission is to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.” Anyone who isn’t living in a cave knows that becoming “closer together” is a pipe dream as things stand now in America. I recently heard someone say, “You know, Right Wing or Left Wing, we’re all part of the same bird.” LOL. If, as it is said, “Charity begins at home,” please help me redress this disastrous circumstance by directing some of your charitable contributions to my dream of seeing Americans, regardless of their political persuasions, act as wings of one bird—say, the Bald Eagle.

2. My second reason is that I’ve been thinking about you a great deal over the last 1.5 years. A major portion of my just-released book is devoted to you and your entrepreneurial journey from Harvard University to Palo Alto, California. I featured you because you were able to take anger (purportedly toward a girlfriend who unceremoniously dumped you) and channel it into a prosocial endeavor that benefits countless millions of people worldwide. In future blog posts I will discuss, at length, how most entrepreneurial endeavors are born when anger is channeled into prosocial endeavors. Since you understand this innately, I hope you will get angry at how polarized America is today and help me by applying Facebook’s mission statement, “Bring the world closer together,” to our nation.

The incivility that people currently exhibit, owing to a perceived directive to “do the right thing” and “not let evil flourish,” has been upsetting me for quite some time. But the reason I finally decided to write to you (on my blog) was an incident that may seem insignificant to you but fueled a rage in me that forced me to consider initiating appropriate cathartic action.

This morning, catching up on my reading, I came across an editorial by Maureen Dowd, whose opinions and writing I have been enamored of for decades. Actually, she and I were pen pals for a while 20 or more years ago. In her recent column, “Are you sick to your stomach? #MeToo,” she eviscerates Republicans for, as she sees it, tarnishing the stature of the Supreme Court by pushing for the confirmation of Judge Brett Kavanaugh. She makes many irrefutable points but then, seemingly without thinking, she exposes the fatal flaw in American politics today by inserting a throwaway line at the end of a very well-reasoned argument. In accounting for the fact that Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee failed to block Clarence Thomas’ confirmation to the Supreme Court (27 years ago) despite Anita Hill’s accusations (and ample support for them), Dowd said:

"No one was trying to figure out the truth or do what was best for the court and the country. Republicans only cared about ramming through a right-wing justice. Even though they were the majority, Democrats were cowed by Thomas wrapping himself in the charged symbolism of the civil rights movement he had always scorned… Teddy Kennedy was mute, hobbled by his own past sins." [1]

Let’s see: Kennedy was guilty of the sin of having a college classmate take a final exam for him (resulting in his expulsion from Harvard), and while we're considering his cheating, there’s the issue of Kennedy’s serial marital infidelities which, occasionally, co-occurred with his sin of trashing bars and restaurants in Washington, D.C., and Boston after his Bacchanalian binges got out of hand. (I witnessed one such event at Boston’s original Ritz Carlton hotel.) Oh...how can I forget: Kennedy's drinking and womanizing led to the death of Mary Jo Kopechne, a 28-year-old campaign strategist who worked for him, in July, 1969. The senator drove his car off a bridge on Massachusetts' Chappaquiddick Island and got himself to shore safely without rescuing Ms. Kopechne.

I don’t know how Dowd writes an editorial in high dudgeon about problems with the nomination of a man to serve on the Supreme Court who was accused of being drunk and groping—not killing—a woman when he was a teenager, and dismisses Ted Kennedy’s litany of crimes by calling them “sins” that impeded him from assuming a moral high ground when another conservative judge was having a hard time defending himself against scathing accusations of inappropriate behavior at his confirmation hearings.

Wouldn’t it be great if we could look at both Kennedy and Kavanaugh in an unbiased manner? Wouldn’t our nation be stronger if we could see that few, if any, male members of the Senate would be re-elected if their horrific improprieties as teenagers were put up for examination, and, on the other hand, that despite a horrific series of abuses against his wife and other women before he straightened out his life, once he did so Kennedy was a humanitarian who gave back to our nation far more than most?

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Which brings me to my ask of you, Mr. Zuckerberg: I would like to collaborate with you to launch the Americans Championing Tolerance (ACT) initiative, which would be devoted to, as Facebook is, bringing the world closer together. Not simply “closer” in terms of sharing vacation and holiday photos and vignettes, but closer in striving for authentic empathy vis a vis those with whom we disagree most. Both Kennedy and Kavnaugh would be babies thrown out with dirty bathwater if not viewed with from an apolitical, unbiased perspective. But to come close to having that perspective dominate national affairs much work needs to be done.

I hope you think the work needed to get ACT going is worth your while. I’m in Palo Alto at least twice a month for business and would love to meet with you to discuss that initiative further.

Thanking you in advance for your consideration,

I am, Sincerely,

Steve Berglas