“If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.” I wonder how many people today recognize that quote. If not, who would you guess said those words? Bernie Sanders? Someone even further left?
Well, no. That was from John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address — and nobody considered those lines very controversial at the time. We lived in a different world then, one in which nobody had a camera phone in their pocket, but when most people did realize no man was an island, and that we are all in this together.
That’s because the experience of your average adult in 1961 was so much more different than today. The vast majority had vivid memories of the Great Depression, when starving to death was a real possibility, and then millions of mostly men endured World War II, in which anyone who wasn’t fighting for and with his buddies generally could count on dying.
Following the war, we had gotten used to living, as JFK said, “disciplined by a hard and bitter peace,” meaning our ideological struggle with the Soviet Union. Both sides believed either their way or our way would prevail, and nature would judge the loser harshly.
Well, some of our Cold War assumptions were wrong, as witness Vietnam. But Kennedy’s generation understood something ours has forgotten. To turn once more to that short and most elegant inaugural speech, the new President said, “united, there is little we cannot do, in a host of cooperative ventures. Divided, there is little we can do.” He addressed that sentiment to our allies overseas, but he could easily have meant it equally well for his fellow Americans.
Kennedy probably would have felt, however, that Americans already would have known that, regardless of their party. Two years after that speech, Michigan elected a Republican governor who came out in favor of establishing a state income tax. Well, that was nearly sixty years ago. Few people are alive now who remember the Depression or the Second World War.
Even the final stages of the Cold War (like when we sat around scaring ourselves watching nuclear porn movies like The Day After) are half-forgotten by the 50-year-olds and ancient history to everyone else. We’ve never known a world where collective security seemed necessary for our survival, except for a few moments in the aftermath of 9/11.
Nor is there any longer any other ideology competing for our hearts and minds. That has left the rich able to exploit at will, and the rest of us to figure that as long as we were better off than someone, we better not rock the boat. The result is a nation whose infrastructure, physical, moral and psychological, is falling apart, and each day makes that harder to change.
Yet we still can choose sanity, if we wish to. That would mean not listening to crooks and the ignorant claiming that climate change is in doubt and our taxes are too high, when in fact ours are lower than most civilized countries.
That would mean understanding that we all have an interest in a healthy public sector of the economy, which means spending money for good roads and sidewalks and schools and water and sanitary sewer systems that work the way we should. If we do that, Michigan has a future.
If not, things will just keep getting worse. It’s entirely up to us.
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