Over the past few days, I've been corresponding with an old high school pal, one of the few with whom I've kept touch. My blog bio speaks roughly to my personal history, and his is not dissimilar. He had a military father, followed those footsteps for a short time, and then entered into civilian public service. He's a staunch southern conservative (feel free to read into that what you will), and I'm sort of a mix. I tend to be a fiscal conservative and a social liberal, although the end result of my decisions in both areas tend to be rather muddy. So,while being lifelong friends, we're both combative and competitive.
We're both retired from our careers now, and he spends a lot of time - as I do - before his computer. And with a national election drawing near, it hasn't been surprising that he's passing along some of the many conservative blog entries castigating Barack Obama. I try simply to grit my teeth at these, but our combative history always drags me into contentious emails with him.
Now, don't get me wrong, I have my own concerns with Obama, as I do with McCain, but Charlie always has a way of appealing to the urge in me to take sides. So as I threw that first counterpunch back at my pal, I had to wonder: Are we doing something constructive here? U.S. national politics has always been the stuff of ideological and verbal fisticuffs - even degenerating into physical bouts in our Congress' early history. But are we, I began to wonder, using such contentiousness as a tool to resolve national problems, or are we avoiding social responsibility by indulging in such scrapes?
I'm a sometimes-fan of political columnist David Brooks. Just yesterday, I read a column - surely written with the China Olympics in mind- concerning the national import of "rugged individualism" versus "national harmony." These are dangerously vague catch phrases, to be sure. But what Brooks had in mind, boiled down, is this: Are societies that value the rights of individuals (read: U.S.A.) better off than those that put first the needs and rights of the nation as a whole (read: China)?
If we look only at these two societies (which is to make the comparison overly simplistic) we see a U.S. in danger of waning in its world-wide influence, and China, still politically Communist, emerging materially. Russia has always straddled that divide, and so it's interesting to read from the writing of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Russia's recently deceased man of letters - and who has lived in both the U.S. and Russia - that we in the U.S. have taken the rights of the individual past the point of being a constructive element of our national well-being.
As I began to think about these political conflicts with my old pal, it occurred that what we were doing was finding something in the personalities of McCain or Obama that we could relate to as individuals. Then we sought to find in the other candidate something to reflect our own personal weaknesses. And with this done, it seems that - if Charlie and I were to magnify our contentiousness to the national level- what we would be seeing was a nation, its people obsessed with trying to project their individual personalities onto the rest of the nation.
What these mental gyrations of ours come down to is this:are we able, in a responsible manner, to solve national problems through the workings of this so-called "cult of personality?" Can we use these dynamics to resolve healthcare, Social Security, Medicare, and other entitlements? From such combativeness do we resolve economic issues, such as our ballooning national deficit, food shortages and costs, the rising cost of fuel and transportation? Or do we have to quiet our personal voices - just a little- so we can talk responsibly about these issues, perhaps in so doing give a little more of ourselves to the good of the nation?
The jury seems out as yet on these questions. But let's take a hard look at what transpires in what's left of the run-up to our national election. Maybe we'll find that such contentiousness leads to solutions. Or maybe we'll discover we need to do a little paring on our personalities for a positive national harmony to emerge.
Wednesday, August 13, 2008
Responsibility
Over the past few days, I've been corresponding with an old high school pal, one of the few with whom I've kept touch. My blog bio speaks roughly to my personal history, and his is not dissimilar. He had a military father, followed those footsteps for a short time, and then entered into civilian public service. He's a staunch southern conservative (feel free to read into that what you will), and I'm sort of a mix. I tend to be a fiscal conservative and a social liberal, although the end result of my decisions in both areas tend to be rather muddy. So,while being lifelong friends, we're both combative and competitive.
We're both retired from our careers now, and he spends a lot of time - as I do - before his computer. And with a national election drawing near, it hasn't been surprising that he's passing along some of the many conservative blog entries castigating Barack Obama. I try simply to grit my teeth at these, but our combative history always drags me into contentious emails with him.
Now, don't get me wrong, I have my own concerns with Obama, as I do with McCain, but Charlie always has a way of appealing to the urge in me to take sides. So as I threw that first counterpunch back at my pal, I had to wonder: Are we doing something constructive here? U.S. national politics has always been the stuff of ideological and verbal fisticuffs - even degenerating into physical bouts in our Congress' early history. But are we, I began to wonder, using such contentiousness as a tool to resolve national problems, or are we avoiding social responsibility by indulging in such scrapes?
I'm a sometimes-fan of political columnist David Brooks. Just yesterday, I read a column - surely written with the China Olympics in mind- concerning the national import of "rugged individualism" versus "national harmony." These are dangerously vague catch phrases, to be sure. But what Brooks had in mind, boiled down, is this: Are societies that value the rights of individuals (read: U.S.A.) better off than those that put first the needs and rights of the nation as a whole (read: China)?
If we look only at these two societies (which is to make the comparison overly simplistic) we see a U.S. in danger of waning in its world-wide influence, and China, still politically Communist, emerging materially. Russia has always straddled that divide, and so it's interesting to read from the writing of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Russia's recently deceased man of letters - and who has lived in both the U.S. and Russia - that we in the U.S. have taken the rights of the individual past the point of being a constructive element of our national well-being.
As I began to think about these political conflicts with my old pal, it occurred that what we were doing was finding something in the personalities of McCain or Obama that we could relate to as individuals. Then we sought to find in the other candidate something to reflect our own personal weaknesses. And with this done, it seems that - if Charlie and I were to magnify our contentiousness to the national level- what we would be seeing was a nation, its people obsessed with trying to project their individual personalities onto the rest of the nation.
What these mental gyrations of ours come down to is this:are we able, in a responsible manner, to solve national problems through the workings of this so-called "cult of personality?" Can we use these dynamics to resolve healthcare, Social Security, Medicare, and other entitlements? From such combativeness do we resolve economic issues, such as our ballooning national deficit, food shortages and costs, the rising cost of fuel and transportation? Or do we have to quiet our personal voices - just a little- so we can talk responsibly about these issues, perhaps in so doing give a little more of ourselves to the good of the nation?
The jury seems out as yet on these questions. But let's take a hard look at what transpires in what's left of the run-up to our national election. Maybe we'll find that such contentiousness leads to solutions. Or maybe we'll discover we need to do a little paring on our personalities for a positive national harmony to emerge.
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