Exploring the 21st Century

As a senior in college, I once was angered by what I considered an unfair and public humiliation by a teacher of another student in the class.  Vowing retribution, I waited until the next class weekly discussion session, in which we debated various esoteric topics of social history, and took the opposite point of view from the teacher on the week’s topic, about Metternich’s domestic policy.  Using every crooked technique that I’d learned in my freshman course on “how to win a crooked argument”, I thoroughly trounced and humiliated him before the whole class, even though I knew that he, an expert in the subject, was right in what he said.  I know, it was sophomoric rather than senior, but it was highly enjoyable revenge.  The next day, he called me into his office and said simply, “Mr. Ward, you have a talent for persuasion.  Always be sure you believe what you say before you persuade others to it.”  That was possibly the most important thing I learned in college.

That was on my mind as I watched the presidential debate the other evening.  The evening was filled with semi-truths and distortions from both candidates.  For example, on the subject of jobs, Obama said that he had managed to add 5 million jobs to the economy, while Romney said there were no more jobs now than when Obama started.  Both, in a limited way, were right.  Obama’s term includes a first year in which over 4.3 million jobs were lost from the financial collapse which started in 2008, over which Bush, not Obama, had presided, but since then about 4.5 million jobs have been added for a net gain of less than 200,000.  Meanwhile, a vigorous economy requires a net gain of about 2 million jobs per year because of demographic factors, and we’re not there yet.  A vigorous discussion of how best to reach a net gain of 2 million jobs a year would have been useful, but it was not to be.  And so it went, for a variety of topics.  Both candidates are smart, and undoubtedly knew that they were obscuring rather than revealing the true picture, but chose not to.  Truth was the victim in that debate, done in by both sides.  They were persuasive, but did not truly believe what they themselves said.

The small obfuscations, though, were unable to hide a larger truth, that each candidate stood in an exemplary way for a competing vision of what America is all about.  Romney has sought to be presented as a sort of solitary prairie farmer, exploring a hostile wilderness using only his own resources, and proud of it.  Laissez-faire Opportunity and Solitary Individualism have been his theme, though he was strangely quiet about that during the debate, and his background displays quite the opposite.  Obama’s vision has consistently been Community: all are needed, and all are valued.  It is an urban view emphasizing mutual accommodation and support.  Both visions are strongly attractive, and they are the choice that voters are being asked to make.  That is what tears the American electorate apart.  And both visions are caricatures of real American history; that is what must be overcome.

Americans are not solitary trekkers, but migrants, willing to put aside a former existence and brave a hostile wilderness to create a new life that provides opportunity and that rejects the values and problems of the place they started from.  They are not satisfied with old values that may work for the crowd, but do not work for them, and so they set out.  To be pioneers, they need the strength to stand alone, but also the support to provision them, the companionship to make a hard life bearable, and the assistance to aid them in times of maximum peril.  Libertarian hermits are rare, not the norm, and not the stuff this country is made of.  Pioneers in general did not travel alone, but went out in groups; even Columbus had a ship full of sometimes recalcitrant, but necessary, sailors with him, Daniel Boone established communities along the way, and mountain men spent the summers at their annual rendezvous.  Census records show my family had the same neighboring families in Georgia in 1820, Alabama in 1840, and Texas in 1880.  And similar community migration accounts for most pioneering in American history.

Not just the individual pioneer, but the pioneer community is the hero of American history and the role model for America in the 21^st century.  Our world has been transformed by the urbanization and technology of the 20^th century.  Old ways no longer work.  We must migrate.  Old sources of energy destroy our environment and must be replaced.  Old laissez-faire ways of doing business and managing health care destroy our communities and our humanity, and must be modernized.  Old rural ways of education and unrestricted behavior no longer work in an urban world, and must change.  Old ways of thinking that Connecticut, and Mississippi, and Nebraska and California co-exist in parallel universes which need not follow the same rules, when one-fourth of Americans change locations each year, must be brought up to date.  But we are, as we have always been, a migrant community travelling along hazardous paths to a new world.  We each must be able to accomplish necessary things alone; and we all share the adventure together.