WASHINGTON REPORT: The State of Our Disunion:
Sisyphus
WASHINGTON REPORT THE STATE OF OUR DISUNION Five-score and a dozen years ago, Lincoln took a train to Gettysburg. He traveled without the platoons of security men and squads of newsmen that mark...
...i.e., to place all Americans on an equal footing at the starting line...
...Within this situation lies the danger that we may seek to "escape from freedom...
...The pacemakers of American democracy spread the humane and hopeful spirit that the nation was to live within...
...And there exists no "safety valve"-the beckoning empty fertile lands of the West...
...History is to be made in the present-that's what we have to work with...
...Its brevity caught a photographer unaware and unable to snap his camera to record Lincoln's appearance...
...A secular definition of original sin might be that not only has each not done enough, each can never do enough...
...And we have moved towards the goals set by these pacemakers...
...America was to be a place of friendly families and secure streets...
...It's just plain, hard, dirty work in the boiler room...
...The cheering has stopped under the onslaught of military adventurism, political assassination and a racial mess that will not evaporate...
...Cesar Chavez organized the unorganized stoop-laborers in the California vineyards...
...He traveled without the platoons of security men and squads of newsmen that mark the journeys of Presidents in the twentieth century...
...SISYPHUS...
...in the present is summed up the past-and in it, the future is implicit...
...SISYPHUShould be our way, too...
...Amid much that is fraudulent in our mass society, there is still discernible idealism and the unfinished struggle for liberty for all...
...Freedom being the heaviest burden of all and in ominous times a call for "order" has appeal-Yeats' "slouched beast waiting to be born...
...The President and the Congress need jointly to repair the country's foreign policy for the future, without recriminatory battling over the past and the accountability of those in the present for our defeat in Southeast Asia, which we almost bombed into oblivion as the Romans once salted over Carthage...
...Nor can "great principles" get us through these times of troubles...
...Principles are hollow-they only become reliable and strong in the measure which we live by them...
...Nor is there some immutable historical law of rise and fall of nations, as James Burnham and others would suggest...
...King and Cesar Chavez and Ralph Nader insisted on living with hope because they could not live with despair...
...But it will take grit and years to regain the lost high ground...
...Political liberals bear a responsibility in this regard...
...King had a dream...
...Somewhat immodestly, Jefferson had suggested, "We are acting for all Mankind...
...Today, they struggle to hold their position on the slippery slope of "a declining economy...
...However admirable to work toward establishing minimum standards of existence and understand the impatience of those who do not yet enjoy such standards, it is wrong to extend this understanding to perpetrators of mindless violence, whether directed against halls of government, assemblies of learning or IBM...
...Mrs...
...Gains painfully won by minority groups are not fully secured...
...During the early 1970s we came close to having representative government snatched from us...
...It is possible to insist on civil peace without being repressive...
...This is such a time...
...We find ourselves involved in a tremendous struggle between entrenched power and authority of flawed public and private institutions and the rights and privileges of harassed individuals...
...History is to be made-not leaned upon...
...Emerson, a contemporary of Lincoln, suggested that "the office of America is to liberate, to abolish king-craft, priest-craft, caste, monopoly, to pull down the gallows, to burn up the bloody statute book, to take in the immigrant, to open the doors of the sea and the fields of the Earth...
...The speaker was correct-democracy is a system that assures we are governed no better than we deserve...
...That should be our way, too...
...Lincoln, who lost his seat in the House of Representatives because of his opposition to our going to war with Mexico, knew there was no sure foundation set on blood...
...Democracy, we now understand, is not a vending machine stocked with good government, high confidence and creature comforts...
...But President Lincoln's brevity turned out to be the soul of wisdom-a haunting wisdom that endures beyond any photograph that would have been taken...
...These are occupied and there's no place to hide any more from our failings...
...Our intelligence suggests pessimism, but our will, optimism...
...An exceptional place inhabited by people freed from the fanaticisms, national rivalries and oppressions of Europe...
...Rosa Parks, the seamstress, wouldn't move from her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama...
...We are approaching our two-hundredth year as a nation, a brief instant among recorded events...
...Legislative poultices no longer work...
...But, more encouraging, one can equally turn around the equation to read that one can not do everything, but one can do something...
...Parks and Dr...
...Whitehead said the present is holy ground...
...Ralph Nader didn't believe what he read on labels -what he was told was under the hood...
...History neither solves nor settles anything...
...A need for "increased devotion" to that great cause-"that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth...
...It would have taken up only seven inches in a newspaper of today...
...We are wiser than we know...
...But not without interruption from time to time...
...The Congress, particularly the House, is seeking to reestablish itself as a peer for a President, and at the same time, purge the presidency itself of Caesarism...
...Lincoln, that most gaunt and driven of Presidents, emphasized two needs: A need of the living to carry out the "unfinished work" of the nation...
...And, in truth, neither the governors nor the governed are doing well...
...We can emphasize how far we have traveled-as well as how far we have to go...
...His speech on the battlefield at Gettysburg was brief -270 words...
...There are no golden-ages to use as reference points...
...His words were consistent with' the exhortatory nature of addresses by the founding giants of the nation...
Vol. 102 • April 1975 • No. 3
