SLOW LEARNERS

However quickly we travel on the technology track with our tablets and smart phones that connect us in nano seconds to Toledo and Tokyo, we American are surprisingly retarded in our socio-political development. Being the Pollyanna, silver-lining, kind of person my Mother taught me to be, I hasten to say that Americans haven’t always been so slow to learn. Oh! Oh! After thinking it over, I take it back. There was that awkward matter of slavery that we had considerable difficulty resolving. My own grandfather Abraham Miles, whom I knew very well, was born one year after the Civil War ended, a conflict that some people today insist was really about state’s rights, not slavery. So, I admit it. We’ve had learning problems from the beginning.

We Americans have a relatively short history, and the history we do have we tend to ignore or rewrite. We seem deliberately to sabotage the attempts of our children to learn history well; we don’t make reasonable use of history unless it’s the history of faraway places or long-ago-times... and even then we tend to turn it to our own purposes. We tend to romanticize our own history the way presidential hopeful Michelle Bachmann did in a speech a couple of months ago when she suggested that Black families were in some ways better off when they were slaves than they are now.

Before the reader jumps to the conclusion that I believe very few things have been done right in the development of the American Republic up to the present time, hear me out. Of course, we Americans have done many things right... We’ve done many things far better than any other people in the world have done them. But we shouldn’t gloss over our national mistakes. We most certainly shouldn’t ignore them and pretend they didn’t happen or if they did happen that it doesn’t matter. Things did happen about which we should feel national shame. One of my great great grandmothers was a Cherokee Indian who as a child walked from somewhere in the Eastern part of the United States... yes, America was already a union of states, a republic then... They were forced out of homes that had belonged to them and were made to walk all the way to a god forsaken patch of land in the middle of the country that would later become the State of Oklahoma when it was recognized as having monetary and national worth. Many of the Cherokee, Muscogee, Seminole, and Choctaw died in that long Trail of Tears. The young girl who was my not-so-distant grandmother survived, or obviously I wouldn’t be here today. Then there was that time much later when I was a child when our country rounded up American citizens and put them in concentration camps because they happened to be of the same ethnic group as the citizens of Japan with whom we were at war. About the same time my country dragged its national feet at the beginning of the Second World War because there were Americans, notably quite a few Christians, who after two thousand years were still hanging onto the notion that Jews killed Jesus; so when Jews in distress appeared on our doorstep in a big ship, enough Americans in high places who didn’t like Jews under any circumstances weighed their fears of Hitler and his kooky dreams of world conquest against their tacit approval of his determination to do something about the “Jewish” problem in the world and decided to turn away the ship loaded with desperate people. It embarrasses me just to think of it. Enough of the American officials thought Hitler was doing the world a favor so when Jews tried to immigrate to the land of the free and the home of the brave, they were turned away. Their ship wasn’t allowed to dock... and at the time it was right across the harbor from the island where we’d erected our major icon, a great statue with Emma Lazarus’ words printed on the base, “Give me your tired, your poor...” We sent them back... many of them to their death. It was an easy choice for some who had the authority to turn Jews away. As it happened Hitler was vowing to get rid of some others kinds of problem people, people we are still not willing to invite into full participatory citizenship in our country. Der Führer thought it would be a good idea to rid the world of homosexuals and Gypsies at the same time he was eradicating Jews. Am I ashamed that those officially sanctioned things happened in America . Damned right? Am I Wallowing and stagnating in remorse that the abominations happened in my country? No, I am not! Remorse isn’t productive; but I have a voice and I am determined in my short lifetime to protest when things begin to go wrong again.

There are lots of things we know how to do well. We are proud of the way we do business. Just look at the ordinary people who have become wealthy in the land of opportunity. Among our citizens we have perhaps the greatest number of bootstrap millionaires in the world... and not a duchess or duke or prince or lord in the bunch. We are the country where it can be done... rags to riches... pauper to president of a company. Don’t let your attention remain fixed on wealthy Americans exclusively or you may fail to notice that we still have all those poor folks who didn’t make it, the ones who may have escaped the sweatshops of the Industrial Age but still struggle daily to rise above abject poverty.

But, you say, look at how many of our citizens, even poor people, have automobiles and cell phones. Perhaps now is a good time to consider our national romance with the automobile and consider what our nation might be like today if we had not dismantled public transportation systems that were especially useful to the poor in small and large cities all over the country. San Diego and Los Angeles were once cities with trolley systems that moved people around cheaply and efficiently. City leaders took their cues from corporate leaders in the rubber, automobile, and petroleum industries and retired the trolleys. We paved over the tracks so cars and buses could go out to the farthest suburbs. We made progress. I saw a consequence of our progress when Margaret and I had to be in East Chula Vista at 8:30 in the morning. The northbound lanes of Interstate 805 resembled a parking lot for the full eight miles between Interstate 8 and Telegraph Canyon Road where we turned off the freeway and headed east. As we left the freeway, I could see that the snail-paced traffic extended probably all the way to the Mexican border. I know from other early morning driving experiences that the freeway north is routinely clogged in the morning for at least another twenty miles beyond Mission Valley. At around three o’clock every weekday afternoon the slow crawl begins back in the other direction. That’s progress?

There are plenty of other examples of our slowness to learn from our own history, and from the history of the world.Look back at the past three decades. A new political dawn broke over the land of the free and the home of the brave in the early 80s. Our handsome, movie star President, unwittingly... I have to believe it was unwitting, or I’d have to believe he was deliberately setting the country up for the decline that we are now experiencing, and I don’t believe that... President Reagan offered up a special kool-aid that our ever hopeful, up-by-the-bootstraps aspirants to fame and fortune accepted enthusiastically. When referring to economics his mantra was “trickle down.” When we make the wealthy even wealthier, their good life will trickle down to all the poor souls who get off their duffs and strive for wealth themselves. The belief was prevalent, especially among those in the upper stratum of the middle class and those in the strata above them, that if you weren’t getting rich, you simply weren’t trying hard enough.

At the end of the Reagan years and the first Bush years, the nation was deeply, even if happily, in debt. We could just say charge it, and anything we wanted could be ours. But things didn’t seem quite right about all that debt, so we elected a good old boy from Hope, Arkansas... twice, actually; and at the end of his second term the nation was out of debt. The federal budgets were balanced. President Clinton left a few things to be desired on the home front, home being the White House; so the moralist citizens had a good go at him. There were enough voting citizens who were still addicted to the Reagan kool-aid to make the difference in an election, so we chose, incredibly, another Bush, this one flawed by nature and experience but blessed with a handsome smile and fine family connections. Unfortunately, he was seriously hooked on the kool-aid; and along with his sworn allegiance to Reaganomics, he was persuasive to many Americans because he declared himself to be a born again Christian. George W. Bush was appealing to Americans because, except for his Ivy League background, he looked and sounded an awful lot like us. It didn’t matter that he couldn’t get the pronunciation of nuclear right, and that he sometimes smiled when a worried look would have been more appropriate. Early in his first term of office on a day when he was reading a story to elementary school children in Florida where his brother was governor, the world changed forever in the blink of an eye. In a well-planned moment of madness New York’s World Trade Center was destroyed by a small, well-financed, radical fundamentalist jihadist organization that had developed almost unnoticed in the Arab Middle East. President Bush had to do something dramatic to show that he understood what had happened. Nine-Eleven gave him an excuse for doing something that he had wanted to do anyway. He started a war with Iraq to rid that country and the world of a truly awful dictator. No one disputes the facts that Saddam Hussein had committed crimes against his own people, against the United States of American, and against Bush’s own father. Looking back few people today believe a full-scale war was the right approach to solving a problem that went by the name Al-Qaeda, an organization whose leader was Osama bin Laden, a Sunni Muslim from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Saddam Hussein was Sunni Muslim and that along with a rumor that his regime was making and storing weapons of mass destruction gave President Bush all the reason he needed to go to war. That war has been incredibly costly in all the ways the cost of war can be measured. President Bush launched a war in Afghanistan before the Iraq War was finished. The costs of those wars and other programs begun by Bush, including the Medicare Prescription Plan, were put on the nation’s credit card to be settled by the next administration.

Republicans in Congress have short memories. According to Eric Cantor in a declaration just this week, his party will be in favor of extending FEMA and other programmed relief efforts to aid natural disaster victims only if the money can be taken from already budgeted programs that have nothing to do with disaster relief. The Tea Party Republicans say they are not willing to pass along costs to be paid later, and they have pledged not to raise taxes under any circumstances. They are insisting that money be taken from projects already funded, especially programs that are favored by Democrats.

I’ve got to end this rant, so I’ll just say that one thing is clear. Republicans and Democrats agree on at least one thing. The nation faces tough times ahead. Americans should prepare for lean years. There will be some suffering, but that’s just the way it is. It is clear that not all Americans will be required to suffer... if this election cycle’s crop of GOP presidential candidates have their way. We all know which Americans won’t feel the pain.