All Posts Tagged With: "Country"

The day Richard Nixon resigned, I was on an out-of-the-way Caribbean island and needed to get to the airport early, so I didn’t get the news.

When I arrived in a South American country, my taxi driver asked what I thought about the goings-on in my homeland. He filled me in on the world’s biggest news of the day and commented, “We were watching you North Americans because you always claim your democracy works so well and that the rest of the world should adopt it. If one of our presidents had been caught in a scandal like Nixon’s he simply would have taken control of the military and established a dictatorship in order to stay in office. We’re very impressed.”

Some years later, Alvaro Mutis, one of the premier novelists of Latin America, asked me why we North Americans spend so much time running our own country down. He seemed to share Tom Brokaw’s view that we had produced the greatest generation any nation had ever seen in history (although he saw some major flaws as well), and he was puzzled that we seemed so dissatisfied with what we were. I mumbled something lame about how the sixties generation had so furiously pointed out our flaws that maybe we had taken them too seriously.

But then, perhaps our expectations for ourselves had always been too high. The first Europeans to settle here believed God had given them the gift of a new Garden of Eden, and that if they were obedient to him they could restore themselves to the state of Adam and Eve before the Fall. Puritanism took the Christian teleological view of time, as progress towards perfection, to a new level. I grew up in the San Joaquin Valley of California, in a little farming town full of Mennonites from the Ukraine, people fleeing the dust bowl of Oklahoma, immigrants from Mexico and some African-Americans. It was pretty well taken for granted that all of us were there to improve ourselves, and our parents expected us to do well in school and surpass them in every way.

So where did we lose it? When did we begin to doubt that we could go beyond the Greatest Generation, and then give up on the enterprise? After all, it was in the midst of that 1965-75 period that we call “the sixties” that we landed some people on the moon. Why is it that some 20% of us doubt that it ever happened? Perhaps John F. Kennedy was the last president who was truly able to make people believe in progress. But then he was assassinated. That was perhaps a turning point in our belief in our country, and it was followed by the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King. King had been opposed to violence, even in prosecuting his campaign against a cosmic abomination. When a redneck cop kicked one of King’s children during a peaceful march, King reportedly said to him, “Please don’t do, that, officer. That will just cause trouble between us.”

Then he was gone.

If people didn’t like our leaders, they were feeling authorized to shoot them. And we became polarized. In the sixties, we still saw the phenomenon of senators, for example Hubert Humphrey and Barry Goldwater, who were oceans apart politically but still good friends. Why? Because they understood that when serious people debate a point, if it’s done right the truth is likely to emerge and what is best for the country will come about.

Now the Congress behaves like two clownish armies, each determined to win the territory for itself, no matter who gets hurt, and we wonder how that body ever gets an approval rating as high as 9%. We have high courts that render decisions that would be laughable if they happened in a farce on stage, but make us wonder whether we might expect justice if we were ever hauled into court. Probably no one alive could do a very good job as president in today’s atmosphere, either, so few of us have great expectations of whoever is elected this November.

Then there’s the crime problem, and there’s the drug problem, and there’s the precarious state of the economy. So we put our country down as if we’re about to give up on it, and the question becomes one of whether we really believe we can be the kind of persons who first established it or who became the Greatest Generation. Mutis was right, though; we have no need to give up on ourselves. We’re the children and grandchildren of those folks who, in Europe, in the Pacific and at home, actually won a war on two fronts and beat the great depression in the process.

Rather than sit in our recliners drinking beer, munching potato chips and watching the latest show involving boorish people beating up on each other, we ought to ask ourselves whether we’re still capable of mounting a healthy debate on where we want to go with this thing. Do we really want to throw over the value system that built Western civilization, and if so, why? Are we really ready to give up on it, or are many of our problems based on our having abandoned those values? Does anyone have a cogent answer to what we should replace them with? What does history say about alternative value systems that areproposed . . . or are there any, really?

Or are we going to go against the very founding principles of our nation, involving ongoing healthy debate about the direction we should take? What we do have here is far too precious to give up on in a flurry of mutual hatred and animosity, to say nothing about pessimism. Ultimately, too, we are prettyhypocritical if we claim to believe in democracy but blame “them” for all our troubles.