The well-known 19th century French phrase, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose – “the more things change, the more they stay the same” – is, of course, true. Those sentiments came to mind as I eagerly listened to Hillary Clinton’s address at Democratic National Convention. I thought to myself: she hasn’t changed a bit.
Once upon a time, Hillary and I were partners in crime. That, at least, was how some Wellesley College administrators thought about us. Working with her at that institution on some student activist issues in 1970, when she was president of the students’ college government, while I was serving as the college’s Chaplain, almost got me fired. It didn’t help when, in her nationally covered graduation address, she thanked me publicly for all my support for the student protesters, whom she had led.
Over the years, various journalists and other researchers have asked me about that era and about Hillary in particular. I would always lead with these, perhaps insouciant words: “she was a good Methodist girl.” (I know, too. I really do know. I should not have said – girl. But on several occasions I heard her student protest partners say to her, “You go get ‘em, girl.”) Hillary was born and bred, and has continued throughout her life, right up to and throughout the latest Democratic National Convention, to be a good Methodist girl.
When my wife, Laurel (also a life-long, heart-warmed Methodist) and I had a chance to spend some time with Hillary a couple of years ago, on the day when she was to address the then senior class at their graduation, I, perhaps improbably but warmly, started talking about John Wesley, the great Methodist reformer. Hillary and Laurel immediately interrupted me and intoned together his oft-quoted words: “Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the place you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as ever you can.”
But sometimes you can’t do all the good that you aspire to do, if others won’t allow you to do so. Neither Hillary nor Laurel would have been allowed to vote had they lived in their own great grandmothers’ era. Hillary alluded to those times in her speech that opened the August Democratic national convention.
Which reminded me that doing good should never be thought of merely in interpersonal terms. Doing good, if it’s really going to be a good thing, must, in addition to everything else, have a social and political matrix. Hillary knew that instinctively, already as an undergraduate. Which means at least this much: the Hillary then and the Hillary now are one and the same.