August 13, 2017
Intellectual dishonesty is the
affliction of our age. Manifest in
willful ignorance and skilled subterfuge, it pervades our national discourse in
ways unimaginable not so many years ago.
Flames spawn denunciations of firemen.
Evil on full display in the town square yields but an icy silence. Assaults on our democratic norms and
constitutional tenets, so recently ginned up and popularly decried, are ignored
and even embraced, the sole difference now color and tribe.
People in power have rarely gone
quietly. What unfolds before us today is
no struggle of worthy opponents; that is false equivalency. It is instead of merit and menace, and it is
existential. A nation of ideas and
achievement, should it yield, will become one of blood and soil, marked not by
progress but immobility. Who and what
then will build our cities, improve our crops, cure our diseases, advance our
technologies, and one day take us back to the heavens?
The America I knew was one of
serious men and women. There was a
nobility in public service, and an aspiration to higher mind and spirit;
expertise was honored, professionalism desired, and truth had a heedful
ear. Ours was not a nation of bluff and
bluster. Serious adults looked down on
such unseemly behavior, for it revealed an absence of both strength and
character. Members of the Greatest
Generation did not talk about their sacrifice nor brag of their service; the
horrors they witnessed and the burdens they bore were the real measure of their
duty, the stability and prosperity of the country they defended and to which
they returned told their story, and they recognized chicanery when they saw
it. How did we forget?
Harry S. Truman wrote that “America was not built on fear. America was
built on courage, on imagination and an unbeatable determination to do the job
at hand.” And while our 33rd
President of the United States was a product of his time just like any other,
David McCullough writes, “Yet here is the man who initiated the first civil
rights message ever and ordered the armed services desegregated.... When
friends and advisers warned him that he was certain to lose the election in
1948 if he persisted with his civil rights program, he said if he lost for
that, it would be a good cause. Principle mattered more than his own political
hide.” Truman faced crises not of his
own making, and unlike anything our nation had stared down before. Today we face demons of our own, created for
political expediency and personal gain, made all the more dangerous because they
are born of ourselves – of our worst instincts, our worst fears. Today, our enemy exists within. And all that stands between us and victory is
our mutual willingness to recognize it.
We all know what is right, admit
it or not. It is as plain as anything
has ever been. We learned these things,
together, from a very young age: duty, honor, kindness. Listening, and learning. Love of country and care of fellow man. We must place these principles and
aspirations back upon the hill our forbearers built for them before we no
longer possess the strength nor will to climb it.
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