In recent days, I have re-read David L. Lindsay’s novel, Body of Truth. In it, he describes a cruel and gruesome civil war that terrorized the people of Guatemala for thirty-six years, from 1960 until 1996. It was the federal government, then run by a series of generals, who attacked the poorest of its citizens.

A United Nations report, dated March 1, 1999, declared that, “An estimated 200,000 Guatemalans were killed during the civil war, including at least 40,000 persons who disappeared.”

David L. Lindsay says the same thing, but he resorts to far more graphic terms.

“Guatemala was a Central American country wracked by a succession of ruling generals who had gained their authority through coups and countercoups and established a tradition of political violence that became so entrenched as a way of life that the country would be forever stained by it.

“It was cruel beyond imagination, and it engendered death squads. Guatemala was one enormous killing field. Death squads operated with impunity. No matter who lived in the presidential residence, the army ruled. The generals were busy executioners.”

A principle emerges. If the civilians—presidents, lawmakers and judges—relinquish their power to the generals, one can expect mass killings to result, because no government power can stop them.

Also, in recent days, I have re-read Bruce Catton’s article, “American Traditions,” that appeared in the June 1963 edition of American Heritage. Catton was a prolific and popular mid-twentieth-century American Civil War historian, who wrote engaging accounts of the Civil War’s battles.

In “American Traditions,” four pages long, he presents a series of thought-provoking statements:

“We are just a little too fond of saying our nation draws its greatest strength from the ancient traditions of American democracy.” “We like to believe that in time of crisis, we can rely upon them.”

“They will rescue us either from the results of our own folly, or from the evils created by fellow citizens in whom the traditions never took root.”

“Sometimes it pays to see just what these saving traditions are, and where they can be found. Who are their guardians? How do the best traditions take shape? How do we know when we are doing them? Democracy’s noble traditions can be vague; what happens when we need to make them concrete?

“It is easy to become very fuzzy-minded about American traditions. The things that make democracy work are uncatalogued and various, but they arise from the faith of the individual citizen.”

“The essence of the democratic tradition grows out of this simple notion about the individual citizen’s duty, a duty that is self-imposed, that the people involved in a democratic society owe something to the society of which they are a part.”

I—like most readers I would suspect—have to re-read each of Catton’s sentences a number of times to catch and appreciate his full meaning.

Although he says that these democratic traditions are “uncatalogued, various, vague, and fuzzy-minded,” I contend that each begins with the concept of “self-rule,” that in each U.S. citizen’s home, village, town, city, county, state, and country, it is the people who rule themselves.

Not an army, not a general, not an autocrat, not a dictator. Only the people. That is liberty.

The words, “We the people,” still ring as true today, as they did in 1787, when the Founding Fathers drafted a document, the U. S. Constitution. Its Preamble declares:

“We the People of the United States in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” Six reasons for a new governing document.

Catton then tells a story of one man who in a quiet way returned to America’s democratic traditions, after drifting far from them. In April of 1865, Robert E. Lee, general of the Confederacy, surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant, general of the Union, at Appomattox Court House, Virginia.

Catton writes, “Lee was an aristocrat who had very little use for democracy, and he devoted his immense talents to the task of destroying the government that the democracy had established. In the end he failed.”

“A few days after Appomattox, one of Lee’s officers urged him to take to the hills with his army and carry on guerrilla warfare, but Lee rejected the advice. ‘We would bring on a state of affairs it would take the country years to recover from.’ He would let the past be the past, and work for the future.”

The democratic traditions work. Like a magnet, they pull sensible people toward them. Catton said it best. “The people deserve decent government, and they will insist on getting it once qualified people show them how to do it.”

Kathrene and Robert Pinkerton married in 1911. He worked at a newspaper in a big city: long hours, deadlines, and stress. A doctor advised him to “get out of newspaper offices and out of cities,” if he wanted to preserve his health. He decided he would write fiction—short stories—and sell them.

When single, Robert had worked as a logger and fur trader in Ottawa’s woods, that vast wilderness that stretched between Lake Superior and Hudson Bay. He and Kathrene decided that they would build a cabin in Canada’s wilderness, and he would write his stories there, a romantic but idealistic thought.

It was summer when the train dropped them off at the station’s platform, in Antikokan, Ottawa, “the only railroad stop in two hundred miles that had both store and post office.”

The town’s bartender told them, “Never heard of anyone but Indians living in the woods. But there’s no one to keep you folks from trying it.”

That summer they spent their days kneeling in a canoe and gliding across countless lakes and rivers, their nights camping out in a tent, and brushing aside the pesky house flies, deer flies, and mosquitoes.

Late in the summer they built a cabin eight miles from Antikokan, reached only by canoe in summer and traversing a series of frozen lakes and rivers in winter.

In the autobiographical book that Kathrene published in 1939, Wilderness Wife, she described their five years living in that log cabin. Robert gave up on fiction though, because his stories did not sell, and instead, he began to write stories of their interactions with bear, moose, skunks, wolves, dogs, cats.

First snow came in September, and another in October. Freeze-up occurred over three weeks in November, when the lake froze solid enough to support Robert and a sled that carried out the furs that Kathrene had trapped and the few supplies they could afford back to the cabin.

Winters in the Canadian woods last a full five months, until April. Webbed snow shoes and heavy coats were a constant necessity. During a “cold spell,” temperatures would plummet. In December, winter began to “settle in,” when they noticed the thermometer read thirty degrees below zero.

Kathrene wrote, “A deeper cold came in January and February, when the temperatures average ten to forty degrees below zero.

“I would discover that fifty-five below made thirty below seem quite comfortable. Even normal winter temperatures increased our work. Robert spent three afternoons in seven cutting trees in the forest or sawing them at the woodpile. We burned a cord a week in the cold spells.

“Air at low temperature is as dry as desert air, and as hungry for moisture. I noticed that at forty or fifty below zero the clothes were bone dry when I brought them in, and at twenty they were still damp.

“Inside the cabin we were comfortable although we kept the temperature of the room at fifty. A large part of the burden of winter weather is the contrast with a super-heated house.”

Robert’s articles began to sell, enough reimbursement to pay for the postage to mail them off, but as for food the couple took what the land offered. If they wanted, they could have fish at every meal.

In the summer, Kathrene had preserved raspberries and blueberries, grew potatoes, and stored the lot under the cabin’s floor. She learned to make sour dough bread. She sewed trousers, shirts, and parkas.

Robert shot a moose or two, cut it up into steaks and roasts, and kept the meat hanging outdoors, frozen solid. It was a self-sufficient life, yet there lurked a constant element of danger.

She wrote, that, “The threat of freezing cautioned every movement. Any accident or injury was dangerous for we had to keep on our feet and moving.”

Kathrene described the noise the cold produced. “Sap in the trees froze, and the expansion sounded like rifle fire. Ice in the lake was heavy artillery. It boomed and thundered in the cold still nights, and as the ice was split, it produced a loud whine that ended in a vicious snarl. That was an air raid.”

For companionship, they had each other, and a fiercely independent cat they named Bockitay, who had the misfortune of stepping into a trap, a proud dog they named Belle, and a rare visitor.

In April, the ice on the lakes and rivers would break up, and for three weeks they were isolated once again, until they dared bring out their canoes. Floating chunks of ice do not mix well with canoes.

Wilderness Wife reminds me a little of Robinson Crusoe. Both are outdoor adventure stories, of people who thrive in inhospitable environments. Yet, they are different. Robert and Kathrene Pinkerton chose to live in Ottawa’s woods, but Robinson Crusoe was forced to live on a Caribbean Island.

Still, Kathrene’s story is a good one. One reviewer wrote, “ It is a true story of this family, written by the wife as she chronicled her daily experiences in the wilderness.” I must agree.

Immigration is not for the faint of heart.

With high school diploma in hand, a young African from Ghana named Robert Kosi Tette came to the United States in 1998, leaving behind family, friends, and “a simple life of blissful innocence.”

Ten years later, he described his decade in America, in an article that appeared in the March 1, 2008 issue of Newsweek, that he entitled “An Immigrant’s Silent Struggle.”

In it, he said, “It was as though I had run ten consecutive marathons, one for each year abroad.

“I now hold a graduate degree, and have a successful professional career, but every inch of progress has been achieved through exhausting battles. My college education had been financed partly through working multiple minimum-wage jobs.

“I was fortunate to secure a job upon graduation, but I found myself putting in twice the effort just to keep up. I feigned assertiveness, after I learned I would not be taken seriously otherwise.

“I went to graduate school part time. I have spent a small fortune in legal fees and endured stressful years grappling with the complexities of securing permanent residency in America.

“My body screams for rest.”

I would expect that Robert Kosi Tette’s experiences are not unlike those of most serious immigrants to America. They arrive. They seek jobs. They struggle to speak English. They pursue the best college education. They are fueled by an ambition to own a part of the American dream, and they succeed.

A Russian immigrant, Vitaliy Katsenelson, marked his thirtieth anniversary in America, in an article that appeared in Barron’s, on December 27, 2021, entitled, “Capitalism’s Imperfect Promise.” He said,

“On December 4, 1991, my family landed at JFK, our stop on the way to Denver. I was eighteen. Denver was flat, sunny, and unusually warm. Days before we were freezing our bones in Moscow in negative 30 degree weather. It was 65 degrees in Denver.

“We were picked up at the airport by half a dozen strangers, members of my aunt’s synagogue. Six of us stood there, holding thirty duffle bags. These strangers had furnished an apartment to people they didn’t know! That was shocking to me.

“I had been brainwashed into believing that Americans—capitalist pigs—would sell their brothers to supersize their happy meals. I think it took me six months to understand spoken American English.

“Getting a job was difficult. I was rejected by fast food restaurants on multiple occasions. I found a job bussing tables at a restaurant on Friday and Saturday nights. Everything I earned, down to the last penny, including tips, I gave to my parents. This money went for food and rent.

“Once I went on a date with a girl to a Chinese restaurant. She ordered kung pao chicken. I ordered water. It was embarrassing. I had to postpone dating for a while.

“In Soviet Russia everyone was equally poor. My family lived from paycheck to paycheck. Going to a restaurant was a big event for us. Our understanding of money was very limited. We never had any.

“Those were difficult years, but I would not trade them for anything. Those years taught me to work harder than anyone else.”

Robert Kosi Tette and Vitaliy Katsenelson are just two examples of countless others, who found a way to migrate to America. Once here, they learned that to buy groceries at a local store, and avoid the shame of homelessness, they had to find a job, and then they had to work harder than others.

Each can now look back at their no small successes. All young and ambitious people dare to climb a difficult and dangerous mountain, and now and then they stop and stare back with pride at the vast distance that they have climbed. For immigrants without English skills, it is doubly difficult, or more.

There are those who call for “securing our borders,” a phrase that often means “shut the door and not allow in any other young, driven, intelligent, law-abiding person,” a sure prescription to starve the American economy of the men and women who will start and build the nation’s newest businesses.

Of those immigrant entrepreneurs, Vitaliy Katsenselson says, “At first these competitors are content with breadcrumbs, but eventually they eat your lunch and dinner.”

Capitalism is imperfect. It makes promises that sometimes remain unfulfilled, due to bad luck, or injury, or poor choices, or lack of sufficient work. But for the lucky few who strike out on their own in America and succeed, it offers immense rewards, for both owner and customer.

For Americans, immigration is always a work in progress. Not quite correct, imperfect, flawed, and yet, for some, necessary.