I got to meet Ruth Bader Ginsberg once thanks to another remarkable individual. And if you are guessing this will connect to “Saved by The Bell”, you’d be correct. During my Hollywood days, I somehow ended up as a writer on SBTB: The New Class and most of the scripts I wrote were for the replacement Screech character, the nerdy Weasel was played by a charming, funny, precious teenager named Isaac Lidsky. Issac who was a true wunderkind off-screen and went to Harvard/Harvard Law School and went on to clerk for Ruth Bader Ginsberg and Sandra Day O’ Connor. What made this even more remarkable was that Isaac had lost his eyesight due to a rare disease effecting his vision and when I went to visit him at the Supreme Court, he was remarkably doing all his case reading by a computer program which would allow him to listen to the cases at high speed.
Though without one of his senses, Isaac had the same spirit, humor, and intelligence of the young man I knew at 16. While he was clearly at this point a brilliant and mature man, a bit of the “Saved By the Bell” prankster remained in him as while showing me around, he would navigate passed a cordoned off hallway nodding to the security guard protecting the passageway as if he did not see the “do not enter” sign or swing his cane almost comically wide when he wanted to show me an area that might be “restricted” to others.
He clearly knew exactly where he was going. Somehow Isaac maneuvered me into a room where the diminutive Ruth Bader Ginsberg was speaking to high school students about the constitution. She connected with them so easily, but without condescension. And she took out of her pocket the tiny Constitution she always kept with her, and spent time she probably did not have given her focused schedule telling them how that living document had changed and could continue to change the world.
Ruth famously found ways to be civil to even to those she did not agree with like Anthony Scalia. But even she had limits which only seemed to come with the current occupant of the White House who she clearly felt stood against basic American values and decency
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It is up to us not to just mourn and post about RGB, but to find the RGB in each of us. We need to set a plan to fight for what she believed in and what we believe in and make sure no stone goes unturned, no perspective voter unreached, no house un-signed. Let us not take false comfort in polls, or signs in our immediate neighborhood, or facebook newsfeeds. There are others out there we still must reach– of all the great vastness and diversity that is the America we should and need to be. Not to evoke Hollywood tropes, but Obi Wan has gone and we all must be Luke Skywalkers and find the force within us.
By the way, Isaac has shown myself and many others what it truly takes to see. He wrote a book “Eyes Wide Open” which shows how we all can and must overcome. And how somehow our darkest hours can lead us to new, even greater heights.
