Repentance
By
Leonard Zwelling
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/27/opinion/the-bear-carmy-jeremy-allen-white.html
In a wonderful opinion piece on The New York Times web site on July 27, David French writes about the difference between regret and repentance in the context of reviewing the HuLu streaming series The Bear:
Regret is the sorrow we feel for the pain we cause or the consequences we experience. Repentance, by contrast, is active. It happens when we turn away from the behaviors that caused our regret.
I believe that this distinction is, indeed, of critical importance.
I think this is the essence of productive psychotherapy. First, you figure out who you hurt, how, and why. Then, you change your behavior so as not to do it again.
I have been thinking about this in the context of our national leadership. For the past 25 years at least, the United States has had leadership that is constantly making regrettable mistakes because the leadership cannot sense what the people really want or need. And forget about repentance on the part of past Presidents.
George W. Bush was faced with the greatest crisis to hit the country since Vietnam on 9/11. He had many choices in front of him. First, he had to identify the enemy. Osama Bin Laden was named. But what about the CIA and our entire intelligence community that couldn’t figure out that Arabs learning how to fly airplanes in flight schools without learning how to land them might be a clue as to what was coming? Is the intelligence community any better now? It may have regretted its past performance, but has it repented by changing?
So far, the answer is that the intelligence community has at least been successful in preventing another 9/11. There has not been another high magnitude terrorist attack on American soil since 9/11, but are we safe from a lone wolf acting from within the American populace? The assassination attempt on Donald Trump in Butler tells us no. There have been hundreds of mini-acts of terrorism since 9/11 most using guns not airplanes. Is anyone regretting these? He may have regretted missing the clues to 9/11, but it is more than regrettable that he chose to repent by going to war in Afghanistan and then Iraq. He has much to repent for now.
Barack Obama said that if the Syrian strongman Assad used poison gas on his people he would have “crossed a red line.” Then Assad did it and Obama did nothing. Ditto Obama’s foolish deal to try to slow down the Iranian quest for a nuclear weapon. Double ditto when Russia took Crimea. Did he regret these decisions? If so, he did not repent by reversing them or strengthening American influence in the world. He got a Nobel Peace Prize, but no one knows why. Since being an ex-President, he’s done nothing of consequence for the nation. Does he regret doing nothing that is not self-serving? If so, he might consider repenting by using his platform for some useful purpose beyond building his library. He may well be the worst ex-President in history.
Joe Biden had only one job to do when he ran for President. That was to unseat Donald Trump. He did it. He should have no regrets for that. Instead, he slipped into dementia and rather than do the right thing and step down, and rather than have his wife admit he was gone, and rather than have his staff admit he was gone, he ran again for President. I am sure someone in that list has regrets. So far, no repentance. However, Biden will be a wonderful ex-President sitting in a rocking chair on Rehoboth Beach.
The jury is still out on Donald Trump. He has done and said some dreadful things. He seems to regret nothing. But here there is a real chance for repentance. If he can correct the economy with his tariff deals; if he can solve the problem in the Middle East with a deal that removes Hamas from Gaza, creates a Palestinian state, and brings Saudi Arabia into the Abraham Accords; and if he can use repentance to heal the terrible rift between MAGA and non-MAGA America; he deserves a Nobel Prize and the thanks of his fellow citizens. If he is effective in stopping the war in Ukraine, which he claimed he could bring to a conclusion in a day, is any example, Trump has a lot of work to do to secure that Nobel.
He has at least three more years to do this. Will he? He seems to have no capacity for regret. Fine. If he can heal the nation he will have repented for everything else.
Finally, I cannot leave out MD Anderson’s leadership from my comments on regret and repentance. It is too late for John Mendelsohn to repent for his intemperate business deals undermining his integrity and his ability to lead by example. Ron DePinho has faded from memory. He regretted nothing and surely, if he repented, he did so in private.
But, Peter Pisters has the opportunity to do both. He has treated the faculty as an “ATM” as Fred Lange memorably said. He extended bank hours to Saturday. He has surrounded himself with a staff like Joe Biden’s and Donald Trump’s, filled with people who won’t speak truth to power. Pisters can change it.
First, admit the drive to professionalism, reducing salaries, and over hiring non-clinical, non-faculty were grave errors. Have a meaningful and careful reduction in force among the non-faculty and non-patient care staff. Stop firing faculty because they looked at a nurse cross-eyed. Leave the current pay system as it was. Stop trying to make budget on the backs of the clinical faculty. And, find some way to get faculty input and guidance on faculty-related issues now that the Senate has been banned.
Second, make your number one priority filling all vacant department chairs. Never in my career would I ever had come to work for an ad interim leader. How can MD Anderson recruit new faculty? The cancer center needs new, permanent blood in the faculty. Texas is not a welcoming state especially for women of child-bearing age. MD Anderson needs to try to find the best and brightest to be young leaders and they in turn need to hire the best and brightest among junior faculty from anywhere in the world despite having to live in a state with a Neanderthal-like legislature.
Third, raise money for research instead of more buildings. Do we really need any more buildings? I bet the boat building is half empty given that the administrators are working from home.
Fourth, Dr. Pisters, be a meaningful and likeable and relatable presence for the faculty. If you need to go into therapy to do this, go. Pisters is so wooden and so distant he is totally unrelatable and this is coming from someone who has had dinner with him at least five times including in my home and who thinks his wife Kathy is one of the best appointments I ever made to the Clinical Research Committee as chair. From those dinners, I never would have predicted what happened next, but then again, I came away from them not being sure who I just had dinner with.
I don’t think there is a day that goes by that I don’t regret something I said or did, even in this blog. I hope that repentance follows.
This is a good lesson for us all.
