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I worry about America.It's silly, I know. Why worry about what you cannot fix?
Still, I do. Like a mother worrying about a child who's long outgrown her guidance, I worry. Worrying may do no good, it may gnaw at my rest and peace. Even so, I worry.
I worry about our craziness. A few years ago I was visiting the Tennessee statehouse in Nashville. It was cordoned off by the sort of yellow tape used at crime scenes. A demonstration was in progress against taxes. A woman, evidently indigent, was pushing a wheelchair which contained her sadly deformed son. The woman, one could see, did not pay a penny in taxes. Her subsistence and her son's entire care was paid for by the government whose funding she decried. Without those abhorrent taxes, she and her poor kid might have starved to death. What, I wondered, was this woman thinking? I wonder the same thing when I see Tea-partiers ranting. There is much wrong with our government, but for them to inveigh against government as their enemy? What are they thinking!
I worry about the cynicism of American business. Maybe sellers were always scoundrels, but I imagine a more decent time. I imagine a time when the customer was viewed as a neighbor to assist, not a target to fleece. I imagine a time when banks took care to keep their borrowers from ruin instead of inviting them to insolvency with unscrupulous promises. I imagine a time when consumer companies wondered how to improve their customers' lives, not pick their pockets. These days when I hear a commercial message, I think, Liar, Liar! The cynicism of American business makes Americans distrustful. We can't believe anything we hear, so, as a consequence, we fall prey to any nonsense that sounds earnest. Such distrust can't be good for America. Since America still leads the world, it can't be good for the world.
I worry about our idolization of false Gods. I'm not sure who the true Gods are, but surely Celebrity and Money are mistaken ideals. In the grocery checkout line (I'm responsible for food in our marriage), I thumb the pages of tabloids. They entertain me. I skim them avidly. But can such sick prurience, such scant dedication to fact or decency or privacy, indicate spiritual well-being?
I worry about our preferences in news. Admittedly, this is a professional concern, but it's not only that. When we prefer fabrications to facts, prejudice to proof, the preposterous lie to the unpalatable truth, what can our future be? When you applaud liars, you breed liars, because who doesn't love applause? It could be I'm getting crotchety and old, but I swear, in all my years, I've never witnessed our political and big-business classes more contemptible or corrupt.
I worry but, then, I'm an optimist, so I can't help dreaming. I dream of an America that wakes from its idiocy to say, hey, let's acknowledge where we are, then build from there. I dream of an America that listens to one another instead of outshouting any who demur. I dream of an America that worries about the welfare of its frail and its poor, an America that remembers, there but for the grace of God go we.
I dream of an America that's candid and courteous and careful not to abuse each other with slanders and lies. I dream of an old-fashioned America that helps an old lady across the street. I dream of an America that sees child-rearing as a privilege not a chore, that is grateful to invest in its children's education and health.
The community news sites of Main Street Connect subscribe to no creed or dogma, salute no flag. We aim to be the Digital Town Green of all the people, no matter their party, race, or faith. The Digital Town Green, like the Town Green of old, belongs to all. No creed or party has a corner on decency.
We do not make endorsements. But we endorse the goodness that animates every town and village, that instinctive sense of communal good, the willingness to help out. Community, to us, is a commitment, not a commodity. It is good people banding together to make where they live more livable. It is the local heroes we salute on every home page, the ordinary folks who do good silently not for profit or praise but because, hey, it's the right thing to do. We endorse cohesion, cooperation, communication in a civil voice.
I have been called a sentimentalist, naïve, unrealistic, out-of-date. Maybe I am. But I can't convince myself it's harmful to aspire. America may be misbehaving these days, in ways that make us ashamed. But don't you believe that we're capable of better and that one day we're going to awake to our chance to improve? Count me in with another sucker for hope, whose words, in my view, still convey America's essence. "We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearth-stone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature."
What Lincoln said, as he took his first oath of office in that fatal month of March, 1861, still haunts us today. We must not be enemies. We must heed our better angels. If I have one dream for the characterization of our news sites, it's not that we should be called Republican or Democrat, progressive or conservative, left or right. My dream is to be called Lincoln-esque. That would suit me fine.
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