The Age of Incompetence: Chapter XVII

"We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last, best hope of earth."
- Abraham Lincoln (1862)

PLZEN On the vespers of autumn in the last sweet afternoons, when the air is perfumed with fallen leaves on the pathways and walkways that cry out for one last stroll before hard winter settles over the landscape, I sense this is a time when serious men ought to reflect and ask how we have gotten to where we are today.

The problem is most of us don't know where we are except it's new and unforgiving. For many Americans the solutions seems to be a choice between Prozac and switching the channels on their TV. In other words denial of where we are and how we got here.

The words of Abraham Lincoln remind that denial isn't an option: "Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or the other of us...We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last, best hope of earth."

Quite often when I feel at a loss to see the road ahead, I look backward to consult history to see what those in the past did without Prozac or 50 TV channels. I found one of the 15 copies I have of John Kennedy's Profiles In Courage (why and how I have 15 copies is a story for another day) and poured through it. The bulk of the book is about how Congress in the years leading up to the Civil War imploded over the issue of slavery and of the few senators who had the courage not to abandon the Constitution.

Today when anyone considers the issue of slavery it seems so removed from moral consideration as to be unthinkable. But I would remind them it was all about money. Those in the South who defended slavery defended it on the basis of economics. Without slavery the South had no economy.

So when future Americans question how any person could be so inhuman as to vote against giving basic health insurance to every American, even as one American dies every 12 minutes because of lack of health insurance, historians will reveal it was the same reason as some defended slavery: it was all about money. When the choice is between someone living or dieing and an insurance company funding your re-election, some politicians choose an insurance company.

 Abraham Lincoln      Booker T. Washington

So let us not imagine in 2009 we have somehow advanced much beyond where we were in 1860. Reading Profiles In Courage neither helped nor encouraged. For a war had to be fought to resolve the moral blemish of slavery, but a deadly new struggle has replaced the old one. For how can it be ignored that the same political forces which defended slavery in 1860 are alive today to take the side of insurance companies over the lives of Americans without health care?

I read two letters to the editor (New York Times) this past summer that still prick at my conscience. "Evil is signified by greed, selfishness, narcissism, consumerism, and other anti-social traits.... What really is the difference in substance between Hitler directly putting people to death and the reactionaries knowingly letting people die because they are too greedy and selfish to help them? There may be a difference in type and degree, but both situations bespeak of evil." - J. Horne, Ph.D. Alamogordo, NM

Strong but truthful. To the victim there is no difference between executioners or methods.

The second was equally strong, but equally truthful. "As a Licensed Psychologist I know psychopathology when I see it, on the individual and the community level. If America was a patient, it would qualify for an involuntary mental health hold as "a danger to self or others." P. Kunstenaar, Woodacre, CA.

It mirrors what I read last spring in the press about America's moral attitude toward torture. A Pew Research Poll on Religon and Public Life found that "49% of Americans believed that torture is at least sometimes justifiable." But when you broke down the numbers something even darker was revealed. "It turns out that among groups surveyed, the religiously unaffiliated are the least likely, 40%, to support torture, but the more you attend church, the more likely you are to condone it."

And here is the part that seemed the darkest: "Among racial/religious groups, white evangelical Protestants were far and away the most likely, 62%, to support inflicting pain as a toll of interrogation." As Leonard Pitts of the Miami Herald summed it up so nicely, "In our smug belief that God is on our side, we often fail to ask if we are on His."

I recall when I first read that report I wondered what a Pew Research poll would have found in Germany in 1939 on the eve of World War II? Germany was by and large a religious country and of course ethnically "pure." Would they have approved of torture by a 62% margin and SS tactics to remove national security "trouble makers."

We still have soldiers occupying two foreign lands, spilling blood we have no moral right to ask anyone to spill, where we have no money nor any will to pay for our occupation, we still have millions of Americans out of work, multitudes without roofs over their heads, and

many more millions with no health insurance and one American dying every 12 minutes from it.

Lincoln was right, "...we cannot escape history....We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last, best hope of earth." America is still the last best hope on earth. Not because of what we are today, far from it, but for what we declared to the world we would become.

It would help if we had a Lincoln or a Harry Truman as president with a fearless determination to insure America lived up to its promises and not down to its fears. (Alas, we have a president who only promises at some future time to act with fearless determination.) Lincoln and Truman understood what another great American understood: "There are two ways of exerting one's strength: one is pushing down, the other is pulling up...You can't hold a man down without staying down with him."
- Booker T. Washington.

The Civil War came about from one side holding down an entire race. Thus they stayed down with their victims, just as in the end the fascists in Germany who believed in the final solution became themselves the final solution in graveyards from Stalingrad to Berlin to Nuremberg.

The time is drawing ever closer when ordinary Americans will have to abandon the comfort of their homes and copy their distant ancestors of 1776 and take to the streets and demand change, not feebly complain in e-mails and letters which are passive at best and futile at worst.

For the twilight hour is coming: we shall nobly save or meanly lose, the last best hope on earth.

It was so at Gettysburg, it was so at Omaha Beach, it was so at Selma, and it is ever so today: courage is always the first requirement and the first casualty of a great struggle. No courage; no destiny.