All's Right with the World...  NOT!

Talking with a friend this morning, I was reminded that nowhere is there a country that gets it right all the time.  In fact, there isn't a country where everybody agrees on what "it" is.  Considering all the possible systems of government,  I'm going to continue celebrating my citizenship in the United States of America.  If the "other side" had won the tug of war in Washington yesterday, I like to think I'd still be celebrating... with hope tinged with sadness, of course.  If the  "other side" had pulled "my side" across the line, I would be none-the-less grateful for the constitution and the framework for governing that makes it possible for our country to go on working for a "more perfect union" without resorting again to civil war. Bringing down the government by disabling it is not an acceptable alternative to the kind of civil war our country endured a century and a half ago.  

It’s not our government that is flawed; it is disfunction in institutions of government, individually and collectively, that occasionally brings our nation to the brink of disaster.  Our government is a good one primarily because it is ours.  It belongs equally to all of us. I continue to believe, for purposes of defining and ensuring civil justice for all people, that everybody is equal to everybody else. But, of course, it's not as simple as that.  Any kid on any playground learns early that not everybody is equal in every way to everybody else.  Some people are bigger... some are healthier... some are more intelligent.  Power wins... and power is not just a matter of one kid or one group of kids being bigger or fitter or brighter.  Power resides where the most ideal combination of characteristics come together, and it's not just a matter of greater size, ideal fitness, and exceptional braininess. An overlay of experience, a combination of the experiences of all the kids, can be more important in producing power in an individual or a group than any other single characteristic however exaggerated... and there is the matter of moral and ethical orientation.  Some people are equipped early with a moral compass, an ethical sense, that other people seem to lack. On a playground there is also the matter of supervision, which is a form of government.  A playground lacking supervision and with lots of kids is like a country without government. 

The friend with whom I meet often for coffee was born in a country which was a republic in the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was created by revolution in a time when laborers and other ordinary citizens of a vast region of Eastern Europe were coaxed into a civil war in hopes of doing away with class structures and forming an ideal paradise on earth where everything is owned by everybody. Theoretically everybody would have an equal measure of whatever it takes to be happy, or at least secure and content.  It didn’t work out as the revolutionary leaders planned.  Communism was a massive failure.  Soviet Union General Secretary Joseph Stalin during a brutal 30-year rule as absolute ruler was directly responsible for at least 20 million deaths and terrible suffering for many millions more.  Perestroika (restructuring) in 1991 ended the Communist experiment for the Soviet Union. The beginning of the end occurred with the glasnost (openness) of the 1980s. Russia and the now independent republics that once made up the Soviet Union are struggling to develop systems of government that serve all their citizens.
  

Please forgive my lapsing back into my old teaching habit of ending a discussion with a 

recommended reading... It’s Charles Murray’s book American Exceptionalism: An Experiment in History .  In the past few months the phrase “American exceptionalism” has been used by political apologists, policy wonks, and history pundits to preface remarks about American’s failure to get “it” right. The phrase was originally used in the hundred years after the Constitution went into effect to suggest that it was a framework for government unlike any other that the world had ever known. The phrase was used in American and European discussions about government to set the new nation apart especially from Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries.  The motto on the Great Seal of the United States is novus ordo seciorum, ‘a new order of the ages.’  I should like to believe the United States of American can still be a replicable model of great value for nations struggling to get “it” right.  We can’t be that useful model if our Congress doesn’t get its act together.