Author Eric Weiner thinks you don’t really know a man whom some have called “the first American:” Benjamin Franklin. If you’ve got 13 minutes, Mr. Weiner would like to reintroduce you to man whom he calls “the least dead” of the Founding Fathers” whom most of us know only through bite size anecdotes because we’re not going to read an 800-page biography.
He writes “I can’t picture Jefferson, Washington, or Adams at a café in San Francisco typing away on their MacBooks while wearing noise-canceling headphones. But I can picture Franklin doing that. I can picture him inserting himself into our current discourse and in his gentle, charming way, trying to steer us back toward a more constructive dialogue.”
A 13 minute video and accompanying short article drawn from Mr., Weiner’s book, “Ben and Me: In Search of a Founders Formula for a Long and Useful Life: explores what Dr. Franklin could teach us today including the choice to be a “pragmatist” or a ‘possibilian.”
