And so we did, but of late we have lost our confidence and we have lost our bearings. We have become lazy – there is no other word for it, and we will not renew ourselves if we cannot be honest about our malady – and at every turn have allowed ourselves to be seduced by the cheap and the easy alternative, which of course in the end is never any real alternative at all, anymore than the last players in a pyramid scheme can expect to see a return on their investment.
To save from paying taxes, we have funded our schools with lottery receipts – and hardly any of those either, if truth be told – and then we feign astonishment as our children receive a second-rate education. We have fought a protracted and expensive war without a selective service draft and without even a tax increase to pay for it, and then are shocked to see that our military is depleted and our revenues drained. We have harkened to the destructive tune of the Sirens appealing to our most selfish instincts with their endless calls for tax cuts, only to awaken to a surprise that is itself surprising, finding ourselves unable to fund our obligations ranging from healthcare to education to infrastructure to national security to retirement dignity for our seniors. We have failed to ask difficult questions of our leaders or to carefully examine their claims, only to find ourselves less secure, less safe, less well-regarded in the world, less prosperous and less free. We have paid the least attention imaginable to politics and government, with nearly half of us not even bothering to vote – that absolute minimalist contribution to sustaining democracy – only to wake up somehow astonished at the lies we’ve been told and the destruction that has been done by the liars.
My friends – my colleagues at our shared national project – America is not for free. It requires an investment of our time, our intellect, our energies, our concern and sometimes even our lives. For too long too many of us have been on autopilot, delegating our responsibilities as citizens to so-called leaders all too anxious to amass the unbridled powers our national indifference delivers into their hands. Now, well do I recognize that far too many Americans were not born to the lives of economic security which I have been fortunate enough to enjoy. And I know that means many have to work themselves to exhaustion, week in and week out, with not nearly enough time for their families, let alone for the seemingly remote concerns of politics. I understand that, and I appreciate that not every American will be able to participate in our experiment in self-governance to the same degree.
But far too many of us have the time to invest in our country, and don’t. Too many of us watch that fourth or fifth ball game on television, or are lulled into mindless catatonic states by yet another empty-calorie sitcom, when we could and should be paying attention to our shared civic fate. The truth is that paying taxes is not enough. Half or even all of us voting every four years is not enough. Not if you want a government better than the one we’ve had, and not if you want a government that serves your interests rather than those of elite oligarchs who capture its power and resources while you’re busy being seduced by that game or that sitcom. We would not be surprised if our child who failed to do his homework each night brought home failing marks on his report card. We should be equally clear with ourselves about what results from our failure to engage in the process of steering our own national destiny.
And when I call upon Americans to dramatically increase their investment in their country, I do not mean volunteering at soup kitchens or Teach for America or the Peace Corps, as wonderful and as necessary as all those programs are. I’m talking about politics, pure and simple. I’m talking about taking the time and investing the effort to raise our understanding about the great issues of our time, well above the bumper-sticker level that too many of us today find sufficient. For the truth is that the forces of darkness which have vastly multiplied in power over recent years are dependent on our mutual ignorance for their success. People who are informed and educated and invested in the issues that shape our national destiny would never swallow the blatant lies that too many of us have because we have allowed ourselves to become ill-informed, uneducated and uninvested in these great questions of our time. Those who would expect disengaged and uninformed Americans to prevail in shaping their government to make decisions serving their genuine interests might as well expect an army lacking bullets and guns to prevail in battle. They would be wrong on both counts, of course, with equally disastrous results.
For it is wrong to imagine for even a moment that such disengagement will have a happy ending. The Founders knew this above all. Anyone who understands the Constitution – from separation of powers to checks and balances to federalism to the civil liberties enshrined in the Bill of Rights – anyone who gets this masterpiece of institutional engineering gets that it is first and foremost an attempt to fashion a government which can be capable and efficient, but never, ever, too powerful. More than two centuries later, we would be well served today if we could even just remember the lessons our forebears had already figured out back in the eighteenth century, let alone what has been learned since.
Many of you hearing these words today may not be interested in government, but be assured that government is interested in you. It has the power to do wonderful things for your benefit, like protect you from foreign and domestic threats to your security, like educating your children, like building infrastructure to facilitate your prosperity, like preserving your liberties and your equality from those who would diminish them, and like making sure that you have access to quality healthcare and live in a sustainable environment. But government also has the power to do enormous damage if it is placed in the wrong hands, by taking away our resources, our liberties, our dignity and sometimes even our lives. The difference between which of these governments we get is simply the difference between an engaged versus a indolent body politic. No concerned owners of a property would ever let weeds grow wild on it, just as no properly tended government is likely to run badly awry.
Nor is this some theoretical proposition, untested by real world experience. Let us be honest. We have been led in recent years by a government dangerously divorced from the first principles of American government and of America itself – those of liberty, equality, dignity, respect, tolerance, honesty, humility, security, openness and compassion. I have seen astonishing things with my eyes these last years, things I could never have imagined seeing in the America I grew up in and in the America I love.
I have seen patriots destroyed for speaking the truth when that truth was inconvenient for those in power. I have career military men of the highest rank cashiered out of the Army for having the common sense and courage to say what is so painfully obvious to all of us today, that the invasion and occupation of another country cannot be done on the cheap with inadequate forces. I have seen a Vietnam War veteran – a man who gave three of his four limbs in service to his country – have his face morphed into the face of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, in campaign ads crafted by people who made sure that they themselves never went anywhere near Southeast Asia when it was their turn. And this all because he refused to vote for a bill once actually opposed by these armchair superpatriots, but then labeled critical to American national security after they loaded it up with union-busting language.
I have seen elections stolen in America. I have seen congressional staffers from one of America’s two main political parties pretend to be local citizens and riot in the offices of election canvassers, intimidating them into stopping the counting of votes, the most fundamental essence of democracy. I have seen tens of thousands of Americans purged from the voting rolls and disenfranchised on the basis of their race, as if Jim Crow had never left us after all. I have seen a United States Supreme Court bring shame upon itself by actually terminating the counting of votes in an election, and by acting as a partisan tool of a political party, instead of as America’s highest institution of justice. I have seen the party of Abraham Lincoln resort to racism and other forms of hatred and divisiveness, time and again, in order to seize and maintain power. I have seen the United States Department of Justice become an instrument of those so desperate for power that they would prosecute law-abiding Americans on the basis of their party affiliations. I have seen the cover of an American intelligence agent exposed in order to punish her husband for telling the truth about government lies, putting at risk national security and the lives of perhaps dozens of her contacts abroad.
I have seen America rushed to war on the basis of the brashest of lies. I have seen an American media and a so-called opposition party not only fail, when it mattered, to stand up to those lies, but too often actually abet in their dissemination and thereby enable a needless war which has claimed over a million innocent lives and displaced millions more. I have seen an America that traffics in torture, that has established gulags, that spies on its own citizens without court-ordered warrants, and that has ripped-up habeas corpus and other legal principles which have been a fundamental part of Western Civilization for centuries.
There is more, to be sure. I never thought I’d see the day when a major American city could drown, crying for help as the federal government did nothing to save it. I never thought it was possible that one administration could take the record surpluses it inherited and turn them into record deficits, borrowing more money in our names than all of its predecessors combined. I never thought I’d see the day when our long-time historical allies would be publicly mocked and derided from the highest levels of our government because they refused to sanction our own transparent lies, or to be a party to our national folly. I never expected that my government would fail to take leadership in addressing the greatest environmental threat ever to face the planet, other than, that is, to lead in blocking solutions more responsible governments were trying to implement. And I never thought I’d see the institutionalization of so much greed in America, the polarization of wealth now destroying our middle class, and the single-minded devotion of the United States government to transferring as much of our resources, as fast as possible, to the already fabulously wealthy and powerful amongst us.
This has been a dark hour for our country, of that there can be little question. And there is plenty of blame to go around. When the executive branch of American government broke every rule in the book and turned itself into a virtual monarchy, a rubber-stamp Congress failed in its task of checking and balancing that power grab, abdicating the primary function for which the Founders had created the body. When the leader of their party systematically dismantled the historic national and Constitutional values for which Lincoln and those before and after him have bravely stood, often at the cost of their very lives, the grandees and elder statesmen of that party stood by in silence, knowing full well the cost. When every principle of decency and honesty and good governance was cast aside like so many inconvenient shackles by those who arrogantly thought they alone knew best what the country needed, the so-called opposition party – charged during normal times with offering an alternative and during this last decade with saving a republic – far too often cowered in the corner, a profile in cravenness, not in courage. And when government told blatant and obscene lies with the most lethal of consequences, an all too obedient American media failed in its crucial responsibility of seeking and exposing the truth, forsaking that duty in favor of corporate greed and general timidity instead.
This list of abdications goes on yet further, and is altogether a lengthy reckoning of our collective national shame. On that list as well, it must be said, are the American people, who because of a fear which can be partly excused and an indolence which cannot at all, stood by through the least and the worst of these transgressions alike, oblivious and unconcerned. That is the bad news, and it is very bad indeed. At the same time, in the end, it was the American people who led – not their supposed leaders – bringing us back from the brink of complete disaster. It was the public who realized the danger and its magnitude – not Congress, not the opposition party, not the media – and led the rest away from the precipice upon which we were all standing, the world at our side.
These grand failures and this laggard success, such as it is and late is as it comes, remind us again of both the greatness which exists within us, and of the costs of ignoring those capacities and responding instead to our lesser angels. When Benjamin Franklin was asked in the summer of 1787 by a citizen outside Constitution Hall what sort of government the Founders had given America, he replied, "A republic, if you can keep it." Surely this charge has been challenged in more dramatic and overt ways in our past than has been the case in recent years, let us be clear. We have weathered civil war and domestic strife, and we and our form of government have survived. But the threat before us today is so grave precisely because of its very insidious nature. There have been no great pitched military battles amongst us, like Gettysburg or Antietam. There is no violent clash on our streets between those seeking change and those attempting to arrest it, such as the Haymarket or Birmingham.
But just the same, and perhaps all the more threateningly so because of its creeping, quiet incrementalism, our democracy is withering, and Mr. Franklin’s republic is not, after all, being kept. I am moved therefore to call today for a new engagement of the American public in its own politics. I call for the owners of government to end the corrosive absentee landlordism that is so diminishing our polity. I call for each of us to invest the necessary efforts and resources to guarantee the health of this body politic, just as we must exercise or brush our teeth to keep our own bodies healthy. There is so much to be done in America today – and so much to be undone. But there are also greedy, amoral and unpatriotic forces among us who would rather personally prosper to gross proportions than leave our republic intact for our children. These traitors – and I choose my words carefully – have many assets whose assistance they have readily and meanly purchased these last years, but they depend more than anything on our collective ignorance and our daily detachment for their successes.
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