A perfectible society?

In the year of our lord sixteen thirty, John Winthrop, one of the leaders of the Plymouth colony gave a sermon in which he talked about “a city upon a hill.� The whole thrust of the sermon was that this as yet to be founded nation would do better than its predecessors and attain a level of perfection that had not yet been seen upon this earth. In the year of our lord nineteen seventy six, one Ronald Wilson Reagan, after he had lost the Republican nomination for the office of the presidency, recalled and reiterated Winthrop’s pledge and added the term “shining city� to what the puritan governor had long ago put in place.

Were their themes so very different and how do we stand thirty seven years after Reagan made his famous speech?

It is probable that we achieved shining city status sometime during the two decades following the end of the second world war when a series of leaders such as Harry Truman, Dwight David Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy led us to do things such as the Marshall Plan that rebuilt western Europe, the interstate highway system that linked us as a nation, and the civil rights struggles that brought a sense of hope and equality to a nation in which so many had not had them before. These things, along with the moon mission program, gave the United States a sense that there was really nothing that it could not accomplish if it put its collective mind to what ever task that was put before it.

There was a sense of growing unity in the nation as the greatest generation moved forward through its prime years.

John F. Kennedy probably said it best in his inaugural address when he stated: “ask not what your country can do for you, but, rather, what you can do for your country!� And, people were running all over the place doing things like Kennedy’s Peace Corps, giving of themselves to try to better the situation facing all of mankind. The Peace Corp volunteers were all over the third world and they still are at it today! Kennedy’s assassination probably dealt the greatest blow to the effort to create that shining city on that hill because when he died so many altruistic ideals seemed to die with him. The nation entered Vietnam within a year of Kennedy’s death and the changes wrought by that move have been reverberating across this land ever since. Lyndon Johnson tried to craft a great society in Kennedy’s image as he tried to fulfill some of the martyred presidents ideas but it all seemed to get lost in the wash of disillusionment that began to overtake the land as Vietnam marched on into our national psyche. Johnson developed a credibility gap and it has seemed to stay with us ever since that time in one form or another. If we want to see the genesis of the high powered gun toting survivalists, it probably began during this time.

And then came Watergate in the mid seventies and the nation has never looked on its politicians the same way that it did during the Kennedy years and before when idealism and national credibility seemed to take the lead. It is interesting to note that Ronald Reagan was really a complete product of Watergate! If Gerald Ford had not pardoned Richard Nixon, he might have been reelected and the almost completely incompetent Jimmy Carter would never have seen the presidency. For a politician who professed to the idealism of “a shining city on a hill,� Ronald Reagan certainly strayed very far from its precepts throughout most of his political career. While he had been governor of California, Reagan had released many disturbed people from mental institutions and had created the basis for the homeless street people in this nation that still exists until this very day. And, during his presidency, Reagan began laying the foundation for the idea that paying taxes to an onerous government was a very bad idea. But, first he had to create the image of an onerous government and he spend most of his political career doing that! The first three trillion or so dollars of deficit was accrued under the Reagan tenure. Probably the worse thing that Reagan did was to take the government of John F. Kennedy that had begun so many good things and turn it into the enemy of the people who had fought and died to preserve it as an umbrella where advancements could be made with a certain equilibrium. By this time, however, we had so many veterans of Vietnam among the population who constantly questioned why they had fought and why anyone should go and strive for anything at all! The greatest generation was beginning to fade as it was supplanted by a multi-culturalism that was taking this nation in so many different directions that it all began to be a confusing jumble of ideas and causes. It was the height of liberalism and that liberalisms excesses were playing right into the hands of those who would take us back to a time when a lily white, male dominated culture was in charge.

Ronald Reagan believed what he believed and it just happened to coincide with what some saw as an opportunity to do so many in this nation some great harm. The Supreme Court’s abortion decision in Roe v. Wade and, to a lesser degree, the school prayer decision were two seminal events that changed this nation for at least a generation or two, at least in the minds of those who saw them as simply more government interference in the lives of the average citizen. These two events divided America against itself as it had not been divided since perhaps, the American Civil War. And, if we are to return to a nation of unity on its way to perfection these things must be reconciled by a population that stares across at each other across cultural and political chasms that seem to be almost insurmountable. Just as we saw demographic changes reflect themselves in the twenty twelve presidential elections, it is possible that time may wash away the divide that separates those who espouse school prayer and oppose abortion from the rest, but, with the other obstacles that we have in our path such as climate change and a burgeoning national debt, time may not be on our side.

The real problem with this nation today is its differing definitions of what a perfectible society might really be comprised of. One sides idea of perfection is the other sides version of a living hell on this earth! Ronald Reagan’s “shining city on a hill� would be filled with resolute citizens who worked hard for a living and broached very little discord from those who would follow any other path. The problem with that approach is simply that many of the citizens that Reagan so often hobnobbed with had, through inheritance and down right luck, avoided any meaningful work at all. Their birthright created all of their other rights! And, as a class, they thought that paying things like inheritance taxes was simply a government taking away their money, not realizing that places like Mexico had been run by a few families for generations because they had no mechanism to prevent that concentration of wealth from occurring. And, in the United States today, wealth is concentrating in the hands of the few as it has never happened before. We’ve all heard the story of how the Walton family, scions of Wal-mart, have as much accumulated wealth as the bottom forty percent of the nation combined! And, we can all remember how Mitt Romney talked about the forty seven percent as if they were from an alien nation.

The average American would find perfection in this world if he could raise his family in some sort of secure fashion and enjoy some kind of a decent retirement and then he would be willing to listen to some of the other fine ideas that American politicians might want to put forth. But, when he sees twenty six and seven year olds slaughtered in Connecticut, it rattles him to his very core! As in the movie “Network� he wants to go to the window and throw it open wide and say that he is as mad as hell and he isn’t going to take it anymore! But he has to take it because he very frustratingly knows no other way! We would be well to remember as a nation and a people that it is continued and expanding frustrations like these that are the breeding ground for future despots!

And, the nations idea of perfection changes as the generations pass by. But, since sixteen thirty, John Winthrop’s sermon has been a part of this nations psyche and shill politicians like Ronald Reagan have occasionally tried to cabbage onto its ideals for their own temporary uses. Reagan’s shining city was different from Kennedy’s Camelot where the king presided over a roundtable of knights out to do the common good. Reagan’s shining city on a hill is surrounded at its base by pheasants who service its every need as they live a simple, often difficult and tenuous life that frequently includes abject poverty! And, even Kennedy’s Camelot came to no good end as they shot fire arrows into the leaders funeral barge as he lay upon it in death and then went on their way to what came next.

And Kennedy’s “ask not� statement has never seemed so far, far, away! American are constantly told that their government can do less and less for them and that is supposedly a good thing and are so often told nothing about what they can do for their government except to pay less taxes as they cast about trying to take care of themselves and their neighbors when they can! Just look at the survivors of Hurricane Sandy if you don’t believe that! We read an article once that stated that the United States has always been either in or on the verge of some kind of crisis and it has never appeared more true than it does today! And, perhaps, those crisis are the crucible out of which perfection comes! But, brother, we ain’t there yet! The generation that created Kennedy’s shining city has just about passed from the scene and so much of the nation has forgotten some of the high prices that were paid by those who placed John Fitzgerald Kennedy in the position to say and inspire the things that were done. And we also conveniently forget that for most of Ronald Reagan’s life, the closest he ever came to being in harms way was in the B pictures that he sometimes acted in. And, we also forget that the one time when he almost lost his life to an assassins bullet spray, it eventually changed his whole outlook on gun control!

IOVHO,

Regards,

Joe