Pacific Views

What I find even more telling - and a section of scripture perpetually ignored by the political religious right - is Christ's admonition thereafter about who will be excluded from the kindgom of heaven: "Inasmuch as ye did it not unto the least of these my children, ye did it not to me."

If indeed Christianity has it right about how things will end, then I think the vast majority of those on the right are in for a very rude shock come Judgment Day.

I agree with most of this essay, and I really appreciate the basic message. But there is one important objection I want to make.

There is a reflex I've noticed--in myself, as well as amongst my dearest friends--of imagining everything is getting worse. And it really is not so. We've been in a period for the last twenty years of wages failing to keep pace with productivity gains, but that's a cyclical trend which tends to reverse itself every few decades. There are some wonderful things that reach maturity and fade, while other things arise to bring comfort--which we overlook, sometimes in our zeal to remember the departed.

Sometimes the real problem is a failure to reform in a timely fashion. For example, while our environmental performance has improved quite a lot, it hasn't kept pace with the dramatic increase in the numbers of households now able to enjoy affluence. Technology has marched ahead, but our ability to manage it hasn't kept pace. Attitudes about what is imperialism and what is not have become more sophisticated and implicated more behavior--but the strategies of colonizing have also become more insidious and more pervasive.

I say this because (a) I think its true, and (b) I think people get confused or embarrassed when they encounter evidence of good news. Yes, there are successes and breakthroughs; participation in democracy does bear fruit. Air and water is far cleaner in most places than it was years ago, and technological breakthroughs have spread affluence to greater numbers of people. That doesn't make the need for other improvements any less urgent. Rising CO₂ emissions are still an urgent problem; our educational system has entirely failed to keep pace with the requirements of the changed technological landscape, etc. But it makes a lot of things more understandable.

James, I appreciate your comments about this. There are days that I am so depressed about the way things are going that I wonder if humans are worth trying to save. Certainly when I use a long term perspective, I know that things are getting better for most people. Yet, if I look at my own personal history, I know that my generation (earlier boomer) had some tremendous advantages that are no longer available to anyone today. In my young adulthood, I had the opportunity to get grants and scholarships for education (now they are almost all loans), I was able to buy a house early in my married life where the government underwrote a significant portion of the downpayment and also helped with the first two years of payments, and I could do all of this on a minimum wage job. There is nothing like this available today for 20-somethings starting out families. The boomer generation is much more reluctant to pay for social services (schools, homes, etc) than their parents. This definitely seems like a regression to me.

And then there are the other issues: Along with the environmental damage and the destruction to our international institutions, it is hard to think that we Americans are really doing much besides slipping back. Once upon a time we Americans decided that government could be used to help people (like myself) to make the world safer for our children and their children. We would spend time and money to clean up the air and water and we would work with others to make a fairer world.

Conservatives believe they are responsible for their own lives and for their own successes. But, I know I owe a whole bunch of people for my opportunities. When I look at the world my son inhabits, he will be saddled with significant debt: his own, for his college program and the debt our society is racking up because we refuse to pay as we go, but rather we use the nation's credit card to fund our operational expenses. (All the while giving massive subsidies to the wealthy via the Bush tax cuts.) Is this the world we were creating? And do we really think that the selfish "I've got mine" attitude will create a future that is healthy for the individuals and the community?

Unfortunately, I think the last 20 years have been a definite regression on the American dream, and I don't think it was because the liberals spent too much -- it was because of a paucity of spirit and a desire to spend excessive money where it has low (very low) value for Americans.

(It's not being spent for education or health-care or jobs or the environment. So what is it getting used for? )

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