My name is Randy Feldman.
I would like to tell you a story about my lover who is hurting. My lover is afraid she is in decline. My lover is afraid for her children, and afraid for her elderly parents as they grow older and become infirmed. My lover right now is very afraid because she is getting poorer. My lover struggles to pay bills; my lover could lose her job, her house and her car at any moment.
My lover, if you haven’t noticed, is also your lover. My lover is my fellow Americans, my lover, our lover, is our country.
I ask you my fellow Americans, what is going on with our country?
The answer, as it was during the depression, is that we are afraid. President Franklin D. Roosevelt put it best: There is nothing to fear but fear itself. “Fear itself.” I didn’t understand for a while that he meant we should only be afraid of living our lives motivated by our fears. The only thing that will hurt us is to be afraid. Let’s look at how afraid we are today.
The Reader’s Recap in today’s Worcester Telegram and Gazette shows that readers are only reading articles concerning Law and Order: Ex-pitcher in bar brawl; Woman shot in the neck; Chase ends in arrest; Courthouse records; FBI back in Worcester; Going bonkers over faith; Oxford man drowns in pool, etc.
It is true that we need law and order. It reminds me of Jack Nicholson’s lines in A Few Good Men “I stand on top of that wall, you need me on that wall, and you hate what I stand for. My very existence repulses you, but down deep in your soul you rejoice that I exist, that I’ll do the dirty things needed to keep you safe.” But do we need more than just law and order? Do we need more than someone metaphorically standing on the wall with a gun?
What’s the opposite of law and order? Ladies and gentlemen, you don’t want to know what the opposite is because in your heart of hearts you believe in that one thing more than anything else: the opposite of law and order is freedom. And what you’re so afraid of, what we’re so afraid, is that this greatest of American virtues, that thing that makes us Americans – our freedom - is no longer working for us. And we are scared. And we are angry. And we are pissed off. And God darn-it – someone is going to pay for us no longer being able to live as freely as we did before.
Before, we did not have to care what we bought, how educated we were, where our values orientation came from. Now we do.
And we are angry about it. Angry about having to care more, to plan more for the future by accepting more of the pain discipline requires, and by having to limit ourselves. We are very angry at this. We don’t want to have to study complex science, engineering, biology, accounting or math to get a good job. We don’t want to be bored or defer gratification. We want to obtain credit and debt to buy whatever we want. And now we can’t. In fact, now we have to “pay the piper” for our past reliance on our credit cards, home equity loans, and escalating balloon payments on our mortgages. We are angry about this. We protest: “Someone else is going to pay for it- others are responsible, not me.” We don’t want to have to say no to ourselves. It makes us very angry to say no to ourselves. And that is the key. Someone, meaning someone else, is going to pay for our anger; someone – not me.
“It’s the politicians who didn’t control the mortgage brokers who sold me and others loans we couldn’t afford, not me who faked my income to get the loan, or me who couldn’t see past my own competitiveness to have a bigger and better home than I could afford to show my friends how great I’m doing.”
“It’s the greedy bankers who fooled and basically lied to everyone to get the capital to make those loans that they knew couldn’t be paid back, but it didn’t matter to them. They made their money and then got bailed out by us to save us from a Depression.” Of course these people acted immorally. Of course there should have been laws to stop them. And of course there would have been if we had serious campaign finance laws to stop the buying of votes and politicians – but what about our own role in all this?
When we look in the mirror, are we not also somewhat like the mortgage brokers, like the Wall Street bankers, when we live for money and getting more of it, when we live for material gain, measuring ourselves by what we have instead of who we are – are we not the same as the Wall Street banker? The mortgage broker? The K Street Washington lobbyist? When we see them are we not looking at a more successful – as far as money and power - version of ourselves? And are we secretly inside angry at what we have become? Not just the selfishness, but probably more importantly the fact that we can’t handle our freedom- that we can’t regulate ourselves. Our ability to successfully live with our freedom is slipping away and we know it. And we are angry at the world and we are looking for someone, anyone, to blame, so long as it is not ourselves. As Jack Nicholson said in that court room to Tom Cruise, “you can’t handle the truth.” The truth of us failing ourselves we can’t handle. Because the truth is we need government and control from on top when we can’t successfully handle living with so much freedom. Then we need someone to protect us from ourselves. And we have now proven that we don’t have the internal ethics to live in all aspects of our lives without more external regulation. But boy, does this piss us off. Because living freely has always meant living as an American.
The solution my friends, my countrymen and women, is still, “blown in the wind.” It is to carry ourselves with, and search for, a sense of decency and justice in everything we do - in every encounter we have - to continuously ask ourselves what is the right thing to do for all of us, not just ourselves. We need to continuously ask ourselves, what works for all of us, not just me. In these times of economic struggle, even more of us than usual only measure our lives, our government, and our society by asking the question: is it good for me? Of course even if we try to always live morally we will fall short, we are limited, we are only human, but it is the aspiring to that goal of human decency - out of compassion - that will deliver us, irrespective of wherever you get your motivation to act good from.
How do we retain our freedom? How do we stay a great and probably the greatest country on earth? At every encounter, with all to whom we are attached, ask yourself, how can I make this situation work for everyone - not just myself.
The other part of it, if we are to progress as a people, is civic engagement. We can’t just sit at home on our couches with remote controls before flat screen TVs and computer screens. If we are to advance we need to join with others in civil engagement, whether coaching sports, organizing activities of good will, volunteering, being involved with our churches, synagogues, temples, and mosques more than just during prayer periods, serving on boards or writing letters to the editor. Whatever. We need to engage the world through more than having solely a personal and family life, especially one that only concentrates on our own personal pleasure. Through social engagement we can increase our connections to others and lift one another up. Civic involvement helps to remind us that we should not only be connected to and have empathy for our own family members, but we should also feel connected to other people and principles in the world around us. We seem to have forgotten this, as both urban and suburban people have been pulled apart from one another; urbanites by the anonymity and fast pace of life, suburbanites by highways, cars, one acre plots and the time pressures of child-rearing life.
So as we’ve witnessed economic decline and lose some of our freedom to our government, we blame others. The more “other” the person is, the more blameworthy they are, and the more intolerant we believe we are justified in being.
It all started with the 2006 immigration law debate, when we as a country were near full employment and the government wanted to legalize those working here illegally. Bricks were sent to Congress warning the politicians not to pass a legalization program (along with concurrent measures to close borders and mandate tamper proof systems to check legal workers employment documents).
Some Americans were angry and found blameworthy the culture of Hispanics and others from the developing world, just as others were offended at our grandparents when they came to America. Earlier arriving Americans thought that the Irish, Poles, and Jews were inferior to them. That their way of living, their culture, was inferior. Sounds familiar. Who could believe, for instance, that at the turn of the last century, Jewish women in the lower east side of Manhattan had to turn to prostitution to survive? Who would look around and characterize Jewish people that way today?
The truth is that immigrants do jobs Americans won’t or can’t do either because the work itself is distasteful (like caring for an Alzheimer’s patient’s bodily needs in a nursing home, for instance), or the pay is too low. Conversely, some jobs are taken by highly educated immigrants like physicians, computer scientists, scientific researchers, or nurses because we don’t have enough people with the education or skills to do the job ourselves.
In anger, 57% of Americans support the Arizona law making immigrants and Hispanics show their legal papers, while at the same time 80% Americans believe in a legalization program if immigrants have a job, pay back taxes, learn English, and are basically crime free. Americans believe this out of some sense of compassion for people who work and try hard.
Along with the immigration bru-ha-ha came the healthcare debate. What else is there to say but that all Americans deserve some basic level of health care as a right. Our past system was like saying, “if your parents don’t have enough money to pay for your schooling, you won’t be going to elementary or high school.” What American would say such a ridiculous thing? That’s the basis for the healthcare change: giving health care as a right to every member of our society. But people went crazy over the government recognizing this fact, because they were fearful they would eventually have to give up something, like unlimited access to doctors and medical procedures (at taxpayer expense), or having to pay more taxes, especially if they are rich.
Of course, the new program is a failure in that it lacks adequate cost containment measures. Because we’ve allowed moneyed interests to hold too much sway over our political system it was necessary to deal with this later in order to get an agreement on access to care; exactly how it was done in our own Massachusetts system. And just like in Massachusetts now, the federal government will eventually get to cost containment in health care, so long as we the people and our politicians have the courage to take on our own elderly people, specialist physicians, hospitals with market pricing power, and trial lawyers over containing health care costs. If we Americans did not overly use the medical care system, because someone else was paying for it, meaning if we regulated our own freedom to choose, we would not need a new system to do it for us. But our way, driven by hospitals, physicians, drug companies and patients alike, was bankrupting the country.
The most recent blemish on Americans self-image, as people who can self-regulate and handle our own freedom, concerns the fight over the Muslim cultural center and Mosque near, not on, the 9/11 site: Ground Zero. Seven out of Ten (7/10) Americans don’t want the mosque built there and 66% of New Yorkers want it moved to another site. But if two NYC blocks away is not far enough away– what is far enough, 4 blocks, 6 blocks, 2 miles? The Muslims who want to build the new cultural center currently have their mosque 12 blocks away from the 9/11 site. In all this dumbfoundedness, what constitutes sufficient respect for a moderate, pro-American Islamic cultural center and mosque? Religious freedom and tolerance is the bedrock of America’s birth and existence. It is one of the attributes that makes us distinctive and better than most other places.
Even more repulsive is the demonization of the head of the mosque, Iman Feisal Abdul Rauf, as an enemy of the U.S. way of life. This is a moderate Sufi Muslim, the kind of voice we keep saying has been missing since 09/11. Many have vocally lamented the failing of moderate, traditional Muslims to stand up to their lunatic, violent fundamentalist fringe. Now there is a man speaking of integration and tolerance, supported by the U.S. government, yet he is being undercut by “emotionalists,” Conservative and Republican tacticians, those who have suffered personal loss, nativists, and the haters. The last group is epitomized by the sign carried at one anti-Muslim rally stating: “All I need to know about Islam I learned on 9/11.”
For goodness sakes, our own State Department sent Abdul Rauf abroad to propel his moderate view to take hold throughout the world. And we demonize and accuse Iman Rauf of hating America because he reputedly said that our foreign policy is a contributing factor in the minds of militant Muslims as to why they hate us. He did not say that our foreign policy is the main reason why Al-Qaeda attacked us, but instead a factor.
Where has our good judgment gone? Why have we lost our ability to see that our success and failure is not due to the actions of others but of ourselves? Where have our leaders gone who will tell us that others are not failing us, that we are failing ourselves? Where are the voices that say tolerance, compassion, and fair-mindedness are as much a part of our American psyche as the search for law and order that keeps us all in check? Directing anger at others is not the solution to our problems; improving ourselves is.
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