Montpelier
Are we nuts, or what? Have we lost our collective mind? The question recurs, over and over, as each week’s load of news streams through here, in newspapers, online items from The Washington Post and The New York Times, radio, TV, Facebook, you name it. It feels as if this great railroad locomotive of a nation has been taken over by the Keystone Kops, or maybe the Dalton Gang. Whichever it is, neither knows how to run the thing, so it’s going slower and slower, while on parallel tracks other nations are passing us and leaving us in the dust. What’s with us?
What’s with us is principles. We’re a nation of people of principle. A Canadian member of parliament once asked me, in the middle of a conversation about our respective nations, why we had such trouble getting our act together in the absence of an overt enemy attack. “You argue so much,” he observed, “and seem unable to compromise. We argue even more fiercely in Parliament, but in many ways we’re far ahead of you. What is it?”
I told him I thought we’ve never gotten over our grumpy origins in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. How often, during those dread early years in the New World, were the less capable, the less devout and the less industrious threatened by their more righteous brethren with shunning, physical punishment or exile into almost certain death in the woods. That vision of Christianity is with us yet, but it’s expanded to include all manner of “others” among the unfit and unworthy.
We almost invariably think ourselves “exceptional,” but in many ways, impeded by our principles, we’ve fallen behind other more progressive nations. The most glaring example is in health care. In that, we’re truly exceptional: We’re the only developed nation without universal care. The reason is fairly obvious: We pay homage to capitalism and have somehow conceived the notion that health care should be in the hands of private companies whose livelihood depends on how little they can pay out in benefits. Those companies, along with the manufacturers of pharmaceuticals, lobby Congress lavishly (which has, admittedly, little to do with principle) to perpetuate this inhumanity. And Congress is apparently, as I write, readying a new plan even more miserly.
The most precious resource of a democratic society is an educated populace. We have for a very long time, however, treated education as a discipline to be mastered, a financial nuisance, an organ of sectarian indoctrination, or, very lately, an opportunity for well-off families to separate their children from the less affluent. Grousing about the easy lives of teachers is a national pastime, which justifies paying them as little as possible. Education, if it is done right, is a joyful adventure in which everyone participates. “Backward” nations, like Finland, have eliminated the onerous tests that we employ to judge both students and teachers, and are achieving results that we can only dream of. They also draw their teachers from the top 10 percent of university graduates — not quite our practice — and pay them accordingly. Some say we can’t afford preschool programs. News flash: We can’t afford not to have them any longer. Recent person-on-the-street interviews of college students (“Who won the Civil War?”), plus the obvious anti-intellectual bluster of crowds at some political rallies, reveal more starkly than ever the crying need for studies in history and critical thinking.
Let’s see. Ah, yes, we’re also pulling out of the Paris accord on climate change. Never mind that the president and his advisers know full well that this isn’t possible for at least four years. Global warming, we’re told, is a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese, anyway; or it’s just part of a natural fluctuation; or (for many believers) the coming Apocalypse will negate the need for action now. What are we, nuts? Meanwhile, the Chinese, the hoaxers, are halting the development of coal-fired energy plants and far outstripping the United States in developing and installing solar facilities. Our president knows full well that he conned those desperate, credulous miners, and that coal isn’t really “coming back.” But the promises helped him carry the coal states.
Others say, “Rampant immigration is killing us! It’s killing us.” This is in contrast to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s statement that diversity makes Canada stronger. Thoroughly frightened at the prospect of “others” taking over the country and instituting Sharia Law, we thrash Muslims in the street (and, mistakenly, Sikhs and Hindus, too). What few realize is that the average immigrant has a better education than the average American; we’re getting the world’s best. If there’s anything to fear, it’s that our youth aren’t prepared properly for even the current job market, let alone that of the exponentially accelerated future. Free community college à la New York State, strong apprenticeship programs in the trades and a decent wage might revive the middle class. It’s bewildering to me that Henry Ford’s wildly successful innovation — to pay his workers enough to afford to buy his cars — isn’t more widely respected. Rich people don’t spend tax breaks; they invest the bonus. Poor folks spend the money — they have to — and the economy profits. It’s not immigration that’s killing us. The poison is inside the Beltway.
In France, the TGV train begins to roll from the station on the second and streaks through the countryside at 250 kilometers an hour. Same in Japan and China. In Europe, on the Autobahn and the Route du Soleil, even an old fogey like me can cruise comfortably at 140, while faster cars — many of them electric — fly past. If the sink in a French kitchen was the wrong height, Mother could push a button on the wall and adjust it. We in the home of the brave, on the other hand, seem so paralyzed by fear that we’re hunkering down, like old generals fighting the last war, and looking backward to recreate a mythical American Camelot that never has been. I can’t believe, for example, there’s any support for the president’s recent threat to reset our newly revived relationship with Cuba. Are we nuts? You want something to worry about? Worry about being left way behind.
Willem Lange can be reached at willem.lange@comcast.net.
