Finneran: America’s Secret Sauce

Friday, March 27, 2020

Tom Finneran, GoLocalWorcester MINDSETTER™

Tom Finneran

The recipe is not really a secret. The feast varies from year to year, as do the chefs, but the constant ingredients are freedom, opportunity, and effort.

Welcome to this year’s home-cookin' festival.

In the kitchen is a black guy, a blond girl, and a loveable Italian gent. None of them came from “privilege”.

Come and meet Doctors Jerome Adams, Deborah Birx, and Anthony Fauci. They are America’s 2020 secret sauce.

Dr. Adams is the black guy. He grew up on a family farm in Mechanicsville, Maryland. How’s that for a couple of quintessential American names---Adams and Mechanicsville. Wikipedia tells me that there’s a significant Amish farming presence in and around Mechanicsville. It also tells me that the 2010 census revealed a population of 1508 people. This is farm country. This is not a booming metropolis. Contrast Boston, where I know more than a few three-deckers in Dorchester and Southie that have at least 500 voters in each unit! Wikipedia is silent about whether Dr. Adams is related to our own John Adams. This is America and it’s anyone’s guess about who is related to whom. I’ll concede that Dr. Adams has a darker complexion than pasty old John Adams but maybe the old guy had a wandering eye……………

Dr. Adams is America’s Surgeon General. He got his medical training at Indiana University’s School of Medicine. He is an anesthesiologist by training and a level-headed guy. He’s a husband and a father of three. May God’s blessings be upon him.

Dr. Birx is the blond. I’m not sure but I suspect that she is of German-Polish-Eastern European descent. She grew up in Pennsylvania and she seems like one of those very smart women you get to meet in every single church parish in America. She studied chemistry in college, and she got her medical degree from Penn State. She’s a retired Army colonel, a diplomat working on international AIDS issues, a mother and a grandmother. Like Dr. Adams, she is charismatically sensible.

Dr. Fauci is one hundred percent Italian. Make that a thousand percent Italian. Parents, grandparents, great grandparents—all Italian all the way. I bet that the family meals are long, talkative, and delicious. Dr. Fauci is the old guy in the kitchen. He’s a Brooklyn kid, born in 1940. Pre-war Brooklyn, home to the Dodgers and a multitude of immigrant neighborhoods……..just those facts alone would prove to be a launching pad for the bright kids of New York.

Dr. Fauci was a classics major at Holy Cross, home to the best undergraduate classics program in America. I’ll admit to a bias here about family members who gained familiarity with the Bean Scholarship and the Conniff and Healey Classics Prizes……….. There is no record of Dr. Fauci winning those prizes, but he graduated at the top of his class from Cornell Medical School. Those Holy Cross kids are wicked smaaart.

These three folks, as varied as the flowers in God’s Eden, are America’s secret sauce. Their presence is uniquely reassuring as we navigate the coronavirus crisis.

No one can doubt the wisdom of Madison, Adams, Washington, and Jefferson as they debated tyranny and developed a governing structure of checks and balances. As we have watched Johnson, Nixon, Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Trump we can applaud and appreciate the wisdom of those checks and balances.

And with the freedoms won and maintained by Washington, Lincoln, Roosevelt, Truman, Bush, Clinton, Obama, and Trump, we see the timely Adams-Birx-Fauci emergence in our lives. It’s not about diversity for diversity’s sake. Rather, more importantly, it’s about freedom, opportunity, and hard work. The Adams-Birx-Fauci trio are just the latest manifestation of that great American recipe.

It’s America’s secret sauce and I am profoundly grateful.

Tom Finneran is the former Speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, served as the head the Massachusetts Biotechnology Council, and was a longstanding radio voice in Boston radio.