And the inaugural winner of the Alexander Phillips Arete Award is….

I want to thank our nine outside viewers and readers — including my accomplished cousin, the actor Anthoula Katsimatides (Anthoula is a board member of the National September 11th Memorial and Museum; her brother John was killed, in Tower 1, during the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center; and she is an advisory board member for Democracy Cafe), Mizgon Zahir Darby, Executive Director of Menlo Park, CA-based Art in Action, my love Cecilia Chapa Phillips, co-founder of our nonprofit, high school history teacher Leigh Range, writer, poet and videographer Odin Halvorson, one of our amazing board members; educator Donald Carlson, PhD, of Trinity Valley School in Ft. Worth, TX, and Jillian Hershberger, who was children’s librarian at Takoma Park, MD, public library when I first held philosophical gatherings there with children, their families and community denizens; and Todd Carstenn, IB English and Theory of Knowledge teacher at Vanguard High School. 

All are beloved friends who are quite familiar with my work and aims and have been most supportive of it in sundry ways over the long haul. [Any readers/viewers who had students who submitted for the competition were asked not to comment or judge those submissions.]

The Story Behind the Award

The idea for this award began to germinate in the weeks before what would have been my father’s 85th birthday. Since his death, whenever the time of year preceding his birthday rolls around, it puts me in the doldrums. I think even more often of him and what his final days must have been like when he needed those of us who most loved him and could have kept him out of harm were not there. Most of his closest friends and loved ones are convinced that he was victimized by a consummate act of evil.

It was with great reluctance that I came, over time, to realize, after even more ugly acts ensued, how blind I had been. I should have been far more alert, given what my father had shared with me when I last saw him in the spring of 2011. He usually was as tightlipped as they come, but he unburdened himself  to me one night about a person in his life who had caused him for years on end great anguish, distress and embarrassment; a person whom he’d again just rescued from his latest and most serious transgression to date, and yet accepted no responsibility for his personal and professional debacles. “I just wish he could and would leave the state and leave me to live my last few years in peace,’ my dad confided to me with a deep sigh.

But it was not to be, and most close to my dad believe he paid a most tragic price in the end. Records show that my Dad had to rescue this person yet again for an even more distressing and serious crime starting early morning on August 25, 2010, and that from there, his closest companions believe (and records support) an extraordinary series of promises and betrayals ensued. If so, it’s a sickening betrayal based on an elaborate con carried out by people with no conscience of any sort. I do take some solace from the memory of the final time I spoke with my dad, just 8 days before he died. He seemed uncharacteristically scared, but wouldn’t tell me why. I told him I’d be there soon to see him, during the book tour I was just starting for book Constitution Cafe. The last thing he ever said to me was, “I love you,.”

Time passes. It occurred to me this year, in the days leading up to my dad’s birthday: Why not make something positive of it? — not in a pollyannaish way, but one that proves even the most evil acts can sometimes do others at least some good, if you have the grit and spirit and the imaginative vision tinged with some sort of plan.

Friedrich Nietzsche’s compelling words in Thus Spoke Zarathustra: came to mind: “If you have an enemy, do not requite him evil with good, for that would put him to shame. Rather prove that he did you some good.” 

I decided to come up with a way [in retrospect a series of ways, my newest book is another] to prove that an evil act did some good — and that also related in some redemptive ways to the best of my Greek heritage.

I decided to have this award in honor of my dad, a child of dirt-poor immigrants from a tiny island in Greece, and who began working at age 7 (playing piano at bars, selling newspapers) when his father died at age 57, and became a self-made success story who never took shortcuts, never made excuses. For me, he was an inspirational example of professional perseverance and discipline (among many other accomplishments, he was the first person ever to graduate from Christopher Newport University — at the time it was part of my alma mater, the College of William and Mary — by taking all night school classes, all the while working a demanding full time job).

The name for award was easy enough — the Alexander Phillips Arete Award.

The Hellenic Greek concept of arete is all about becoming an ‘excellent all-arounder,’ not in a self-serving way, but in which duty to self and others goes hand in glove. While this sublime Greek value is clearly held in disdain by those with my dad at the end, to me it is in large measure what life is all about. I even have the words arete and meraki (giving everything you have to everything you do with soul and passion and spirit) tattooed on my arms (I write a bit about my tattoos here.)

The next step was to come up with a theme. This first year, it seemed as if the only appropriate one somehow had to touch on evil and our possible deliverance from it — here is the announcement I first put out that describes what it’s all about.

It was wonderfully touching, given the short notice and the late date in the school year when high school and college students are inundated with work, how many rose to the occasion and submitted works — and how this spoke as well to their teachers (one of whom made a generous donation to this award to go along with my own).

For now, I will only add that what such people as those who were with my dad at the end cannot begin to fathom is that I would willingly have handed over to them every penny of my father’s estate, which he had painstakingly accumulated, at considerable personal sacrifice over a period of decades, if only I’d had the chance to say good-bye to him (I was never so much as informed of his death by those with him, and their ‘reasoning’ for neglecting to tell me, as one can imagine, was nauseating).

Life goes on, I cherish my family more than ever, have greater empathy for those who experience sufferings of their own — and I do take some considerable solace in the long, memorable and wide-ranging conversations my Dad and I had the last time we were together, when my wife and oldest daughter and I joined him for a marvelous vacation in the outskirts of the Orlando area in the spring of 2011.

My dad and I didn’t see eye to eye on everything, but we’d long since smoothed everything over. He told me, that last time we were together, among so many other things that he revealed but until then had kept locked in his heart, how proud he was of me and the legacy I was striving to leave the world, and most of all of the example I was setting as a father and husband — just wish he’d lived to see the 2013 birth of our beautiful Cybele, with whom he’d have fallen in love at first sight, as he did with our Cali.

Any time I even flirt with the idea of being dejected over the state and straits of the world in general, much less facets of my own world, and how at times it seems that morally rudderless sociopaths/psychopaths and ultra narcissists are prevailing, I need only look to the works and deeds of our young people, such as the students in the IB class of 2018 at Vanguard High School, and around the world who are determined to do all they can to arrest any and all such pernicious developments, and to be the sublime change they want to see in the world at large.

‘Childkind’ and ‘youthkind,’ I’m convinced, will show us adults the way out of these seemingly intractable morasses of our own making. They certainly have inspired me to redouble my own efforts, and do all I can and must with my own modest talents to make ours a more heart-shaped world.

Thank you, to everyone, to whom this project has touched a chord.  I feel in my heart that my dad somehow, some way, feels your love.

p.s. I will hold this award competition again in the years to come, in the name of my father, and peg it to timely and timeless themes that in some way relate to his life and death — and promise I will do so with with more lead time, in order to spread the word far and wide more effectively. And next time around, I’ll also ask for submission of works of art (drawings, paintings, and other media), and of music, since my dad was an excellent self-taught  piano player who played at local taverns and such in Tampa as a boy to help earn money for his family after his own dad passed away at age 57 when he was just 7 years old.

And here I’ll share a picture of me, my wife Ceci, and daughter Cali, the last time we were with my dad in the spring of 2011

as well as a picture of him in the prime of life.

As if this wasn’t tragic enough, nearly all of my dad’s possessions — including, if you can believe it, a birthday card my dad had purchased for my oldest daughter, and all my signed books that I’d given to my dad over the years, as well as all family pictures and movies, and valuables like rings and old coins — had been removed from his home by these people before anyone else had a chance to arrive on the scene (though, nauseatingly and chillingly, I was informed that they didn’t even bother to clean the sheets on which he’d soiled himself before his life ended or was ended.. Cravenness and cupidity, alas, know few bounds among those lacking a moral compass or conscience. Sadly, there are people who will betray any trust and confidence, who will do anything — anything, no matter how heinous — for money and material gain, and they will even convince themselves it is what they are entitled to. They are expert liars, cheaters, con artists, and worse — they are superficial charmers who even find humor in their machinations against good and decent people, if you can believe it. Evil personified.

But here again, what they don’t realize is that are things far more precious and valuable — works and deeds, for instance, like those my dad achieved in life, and that I strive to achieve of another sort, that smack of arete.

I love you, Dad.  Thank you for your legacy, and I’m so grateful you are so proud of mine. I won’t let you down.