Sobering thoughts

Peggy Noonan's A Separate Peace is worthy of a slow read and several moments reflection. (FYI: The rest of this post won't make much sense if you haven't read her op-ed.)

I forwarded that article to a buddy of mine for his consideration, and was a bit surprised at his reply - which he agreed to let me post here. (His email was part of an ongoing conversation between us, so some of his points may seem obscure. The relevant points, however, are plain.)

Excellent article. At the risk of sounding corny, I almost well up thinking about the travesty of it all. I've felt and thought more or less the same thing. I think the kids of today will be faced with so many less liberties than we had as kids that our childhood will seem impossible to them.

Part of this is the result of a water torture we've let go for years. Leftist agendas have failed in the public view and therefore were moved to the education system. There, under the guise of "we need to do something about education in this country" the left found and continues to find an endless supply of cash and a system open to their thinking. As these ideas are squeezed into the minds of our youth, they leak ever so slowly out into the media, their close cousin. (As a side note: My new contention is that we need to spend less on education.)

It's interesting when you discuss McCarthy and the "witch hunt" he conducted how that we all agree what he did was wrong yet what he said was largely correct. We're paying the price of communist and leftist influence in the arts now. It's pervasiveness is seen in Hollywood as much as it is in education and the media.

Perhaps we have ourselves to blame. Our own tools of liberty have been wielded skillfully against us. To the extent that we have let them actually become impotent to use them in defense let alone offer an offense. Describe correctly one's need to take responsibility for themselves and you're instantly racist, bigoted, hater, or the like. These are the new capital crimes. Rape, incest, murder, robbery, these are all secondary. For them, you merely go through the system. For the former, public opinion will ruin you to the point that those who would stand beside you are held in check. It's a socio-psychological control mechanism that has worked well in communist nations (to a point). It's mind control in its infancy. We're so numb to it now that it is very much like water torture.

Now what do we do? Boortz has maintained that he intends to die before the worst of it comes. Our children don't know what we're talking about so they don't see the problem. We may be powerless by this point. By the time someone is able to quantify what happened and what is wrong, he will be a "throw-back," or "old-fashioned." He or she won't be taken seriously. The Constitution will be viewed as outdated and unuseful in a "modern society."

The wheels are off the trolley, the trolley is off the track but the bar is open and the music is playing. Eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die.

JP

One can study either America's founding or current politics, but not both. Not without sinking into despondency, cynicism and despair. America's best days are well behind us.

Since reading Miss Noonan's editorial last fall, I've found myself more aware of the despondent surrender she describes. My buddy is but one example. Two colleagues of mine, with whom I frequently discuss politics, exhibit Ted Kennedy's and Neil Boortz's familiar attitude: "Well I'll be gone before it all hits the fan anyway."

No longer is politics the art of statecraft, the building of a nation to bequeath to our posterity. Politics has become a way of getting something for ourselves, for our own comfort, in our own lifetimes, the future be damned.

No longer do we labor so that our children will be better off than we - healthier, better-educated, wiser, with more opportunities and fewer worries, better-equipped to pursue virtue and excellence. The bumper-sticker humor "we're spending our children's inheritance" is our philosophical approach to life.

We have Ipods in our ears, music in our cars, television, movie theaters, music in restaurants, CDs, DVDs, MP3s, distractions of every sort. Distractions. But to distract us from what?

One of the most shocking scenes from Huxley's Brave New World is when Lenina refuses to gaze out the window at the seascape, the moon, the clouds. Instead she turns away in horror from the scenery, and turns on the radio. Huxley's dystopia is a world of constant distraction - the "feelies", antidepressants and hallucinogens, artificial "multimedia" stimulation of sights and sounds and smells, the constant flow of empty sexual encounters and orgies.

Overwhelm the senses and dull the mind. Render people incapable of reflecting on life and the world around them. "I have become comfortably numb."

That second dose of soma had raised a quite impenetrable wall between the actual universe and their minds.

Our distractophilia is not mere pastime in which we idle away the hours, but verges instead on obsession. But, when we stop our ears and shut our eyes, what is it that we're trying to ignore? Miss Noonan describes this "cultural subtext":

I think that a lot of people are carrying around in their heads, unarticulated and even in some cases unnoticed, a sense that the wheels are coming off the trolley and the trolley off the tracks. That in some deep and fundamental way things have broken down and can't be fixed, or won't be fixed any time soon.

Birds know when a storm is coming. Rats abandon a sinking ship. And we seem to sense something is terribly wrong, even if we can't quite nail it down.

But it seems to me we must either nail it down or get hammered when it hits. (As the nurse, Stella, in Hitchcock's Rear Window put it, "When General Motors has to go to the bathroom ten times a day, the whole country’s ready to let go.")

We must begin by acknowledging that something is wrong. Until we face the danger, it's impossible for us to defeat it. We must shatter the groupthink that makes this subject taboo. That seems to have been Miss Noonan's purpose, and it is my purpose in posting my friend's recognition of this problem, and my own. Until we realize there just might be enough of us to fight it, we will go gently into that good night.

I have no children to whom to bequeath the nation. So it would be easy to simply get all I can while I'm here and leave the next generation to clean up the mess. That would be self-centered, unloving, irreponsible and dishonorable. There's plenty of that attitude around, and so I could fit right into the hedonist culture. But I spent the first half of my life pursuing my own selfish interests. Doesn't maturity at some point demand we look beyond ourselves?