About three years ago, in summer, 2019, I read a splendid little book, on democracy by E.B. White. I had read his essays collected in the Points of My Compass decades ago. White was born in 1908. I find his writings from 60-70 years ago to be uncannily relevant today as we find democracy under challenge in our country and around the world. As we'll see, the challenges are not new nor is the need for courage and stamina in meeting them.
In the 1940's White wrote this: " The pesky nature of democratic life is it has no comfortable rigidity; it always hangs by a thread, never quite submits to consolidation or solidification, is always being challenged, always being defended.”
Writing before the entry of the US into World War II, as Hitler’s reign creeped across Europe, he wrote: “I just want to tell you, before I get slowed down, that I am in love with Freedom and that it is an affair of longstanding and that it is a fine state to be in, and that I am deeply suspicious of people who are beginning to adjust to fascism and dictators merely because they are succeeding in war. From such adaptable natures, a smell rises. I pinch my nose.”
What an apt description of how I felt about the Trump presidency and Trump himself as he is revealed by the January 6th Commission (and how I feel about Putin's invasion of Ukraine today).
“My first and greatest love affair was with this thing we call Freedom, this lady of infinite allure, this dangerous and beautiful and sublime being who restores and supplies us all.”
Writing in 1943, advocating the world coming together in a government, White writes: “Were we ever to get one (a world government), it would impose on the individual the curious burden of taking the entire globe to his bosom—although not in any sense depriving him of the love of his front yard.”
“A world made one by the political union of its parts, would not only require of its citizen a shift of allegiance, but it would also deprive him of an enormous personal satisfaction of distrusting what he doesn’t know and despising what he hasn’t seen. This would be a severe depravation, perhaps an intolerable one. The awful truth is, a world government would lack an enemy and that is a deficiency not to be lightly dismissed. It will take a yet undiscovered vitamin to supply the blood of man with a substitute for national ambition and racial antipathy; but (White I fear far too optimistically concludes) we are discovering new vitamins all the time, and I am aware of that, too.”
Eerily anticipating our own time, and commenting on the FCC’s regulation of radio, White writes, “This country is on the verge of getting news-drunk; the democracy cannot survive merely by being well informed, it must also be contemplative, and wise.”
Never so much today as in taking the time and the care to try to understand the other point of view and what truth really is.
In October 1952, White writes, “We doubt that there ever was a time in this country when so many people tried to discredit so many other people.”
Well, he ought to be around today.
“About a year ago, we started to compile a handbook of defamation, but the list got too big for us and we abandoned the project as both unwieldy and unlovely. Discreditation has become a national sickness for which no cure has so far been found, and there is a strong likelihood that we will all wake up some morning to learn that, in the whole land, there is not one decent man. Vilification, condemnation, revelation—these supply a huge part of the columns of the papers, and the story of life in the United States dissolves into a novel of perfidy, rascality, iniquity and misbehavior. The writing of this lurid tale commands more and more of the time of the citizens.”
In June 1960 in the midst of that presidential campaign, White writes that he has read the books and published speeches of many of the candidates for president, including Kennedy, Chester Bowles, Nixon, Stevenson and Rockefeller. He observes something that I’ve felt for at least the last eight years. “They speak of new principles for a new age, but for the most part, I find old principles for a time that has passed. Most of the special matters they discuss are pressing, but taken singly or added together, they do not point in a steady direction, they do not name a destination that gets me up in the morning to pull on my marching boots. Once in a while, I try a little march on my own, stepping out briskly toward a reputable hill, but when I do I feel that I am alone, and that I am on a treadmill.”
For my money, President Obama described a vision worthy of “pulling on my marching boots.” It was a vision of inclusiveness, of living our nation’s highest values embedded in living to a fuller degree our nation’s founding principles embedded in the Declaration of Independence. But sadly his administration, impeded by Republican opposition aimed at making him a one-term president, didn’t in the end fulfill that vision. We were not united as a country. And President Trump divided this nation more than ever.
Therein lies the greatest need for our next president, I wrote months before the 2020 election. We can’t just be driven by what we’re against even though the commitment to ensure that Trump doesn’t have another four years is correct. We must anchor our vision and the plans to carry it out on the future, together united.
Sadly, we remain far from realizing this vision. We remain divided, and angry with those who disagree with us.Yet, we cannot falter in our pursuit of this vision. Just as in the past, we must retain the commitment and energy to keep going, recognizing in the words of the Talmud, we are not required to complete the task, but nor are allowed to desist from
it.
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