Archive: Opinions

The Kavanaugh Senate hearings (the Ithaca High School Tattler newspaper said it better: The 'Supreme Court ordeal') left me drained. Almost speechless. Not that I've 'been around' forever, but I have not seen anything in this country so demeaning and damaging to our national psyche as these past few weeks (you know, even the Watergate hearings had some civility to them).

There is a true hatred unleashed in this country and I am not sure that any country can survive hatred. Division, yes, of course, but we have survived division in the past, especially noteworthy were our sixties. But, maybe, on second thought, we didn't quite 'survive' the pains and divisiveness of the sixties: maybe we just put it all on ice during the seventies (certainly no one wanted to be reminded of VietNam in the mid-seventies). The racial divide, the war, Johnson, Nixon, Chicago, the social upheaval didn't just fade away like yesterday's hit songs after traumas like Kent State, after the Paris 'peace' accord, after the race riots. After Watergate.

We just slipped into platform shoes, disco, MASH, All in the Family, Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter. But the discord and division of the baby boomers may have been lying in wait while we got into marriage, family life, and the eighties. Moribund but certainly not dead. Just waiting to rise again. I'm not the only one who is really beginning to fear. And it's not a political one side or the other fear. It feels like a deep fear for how we appear to be devolving. The 'Chicken Little' part of my brain keeps saying 'this is how empires fall'. Maybe in the sixties chaos was exciting and new to this teenager. As an old man, it feels dangerous, cliff-like. Strange to think this may have been how my parents, certainly my grandparents, felt.

I found this quote from John Adams, the curmudgeon second President of the new republic called the United States, who of course was no stranger to conflict, bad press relations, divisiveness and partisan angers. Some historians feel that Washington's desire for unity and antipathy to 'party loyalties' foundered on the antipathy displayed by Adams and Thomas Jefferson to each others' ideas on the nature of the new republic and the role of the people and press. The enmity became quite personal and lasted for years, until Jefferson left office, and finally quelled prior to their deaths, in amicable correspondence and understanding of the responsibilities of the chief executive. They died on the same day, within hours of each other, on the American independence day.

Adams warned his countrymen in 1798: "We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion...avarice, ambition, revenge or gallantry...[These vices] would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other."

As we hear the Constitution being weaponized to defend actions, and behaviors beyond the historic pale of what used to be considered 'civil discourse' and 'agree to disagree' in the halls of our government, and worst of all on our television screens and at our dinner tables (those tables where political discourse is still possible), it seems we are allowing our country to go through that 'net' that Adams spoke of: 'like a whale through a net'.

We could certainly be slip-sliding down into a valley where 'human passions unbridled by morality and religion' are no longer governed by rationality. We don't have to go to antiquity to see this and its symptoms, you know. We have plenty of examples in the past hundred years, as well as other countries currently in our wretched news 'cycle' of today. None of these examples of political chaos is pretty, and they seem so distant, but the thunder is certainly being heard here by perceptive ears. And the world seems to be watching us in stunned confusion and disbelief. At least they're watching us, for we seem to be ignoring the rest of the world as it also tears itself apart over some of the same divisive issues. And our problems seem magnified.

Who, or what, will bring back the sanity and amity? We have to keep looking, keep listening, even though we want to shut our eyes and ears. There's got to be another John Adams or Thomas Jefferson out there. Somewhere. Keep your lantern lit, Diogenes. America is a land of hope. Still. Always has been, says this old man.

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