This first decade of the 21st century has been rough sledding. We started with Y2K, then Bush v. Gore, then 9/11, Afghanistan and Iraq, the war on terror, and now an economic depression. But let me focus on 9/11.
Our initial reactions were humanely right: compassion for those who were killed or injured; anger at those who caused it; reaching out to other countries and receiving their expressions of solidarity; searching our souls and reviewing our actions for the causes of this savagery; patriotism – love of country and seeking to heal its wounds; and bipartisanship – putting aside the petty and destructive bickering.
But we quickly lost whatever renewed focus that crisis gave us and, instead, our institutional responses have been uniformly wrong: cutting ourselves off from the rest of the world; starting the Iraq war without justification; secrecy; lack of political and moral courage; torture; secret prisons; extreme rendition; a steady diet of manipulation and fear.
And in our leaders – and ourselves – selfishness: from our gas guzzlers to our hunger for cheap goods that satisfy momentarily and despoil our planet, perhaps permanently. We have no universal health care. Our infrastructure is crumbling and we are unwilling to tax ourselves for our spending (war, education and otherwise). Our Tax Code is a disgrace – a 67,000 page behemoth of special interests and special breaks for those who need it the least. Our elections are auctions.
But with all of this, the most distressing is that we have lost our capacity for moral outrage. (Our fuses are plenty short - our freeway aggression, our internet rudeness, our miniscule attention spans, our fascination with violence.)
The necessary outrage, though – the unwillingness to tolerate another moment of injustice – is still asleep and may be dead. We are willing and uncritical recipients of lies, spin, and half-truths. We seldom seek accurate information because that takes effort on our part. We are passive politically and we congratulate ourselves when 54% vote in an election where the greatest effort required is putting a stamp on an envelope.
I am an optimist by nature, but in my 66th year I do not know what it will take to
re-awaken the American spirit. (It will not be by chanting U – S – A at the Olympics.) I believe with Alexis de Tocqueville that America is great because she is good, and if she ever ceases to be good, she will cease to be great.
What we need is what our political system is not capable of delivering – moral leadership. I’m not talking about professing religious faith. I’m talking about truth, fairness, inclusion, and compassion; stewardship of the earth and its creatures; fair wages, honest work, opportunity, education, taking care of each other; and living in real communities instead of gated enclaves.
Political parties can’t do this because they are clans. Unfortunately for us, the only people who are engaged – really engaged in politics these days – are the partisans who, in one Democrat’s parlance – would “vote for a rabid dog” before he would vote for a non-Democrat. It’s like saying: my father – drunk or sober: no values, no judgment, no intellect.
Blind loyalty – and to what? A party (take your choice) that has brought you debt, war, outrageous military spending, neglected infrastructure, 47 million without health care, and on and on.
Will 60 Democratic votes in the Senate change this? Not a chance. I give two examples only: First, cram down means pay back. The minute Democrats can no longer cram down, the Republicans will undo everything and we will be in a worse mess. Second, look at every proposal for health care including that of Ron Wyden. They all are based on private health insurance because nobody is willing to take on the pharmaceutical and insurance lobbies.
So, with all of this pestilence and folly, what am I, John Frohnmayer, going to do about it? I admit that I am not very good at being a politician: I don’t like talking about myself and abhor asking for money to buy TV ads to appeal to those who will vote on the basis of those ads alone.
What else is there? What I hoped when I entered this race 10 months ago, was that there would be an upwelling of support from independent-minded Oregonians and that I could help focus their concerns. I have not detected such a movement. The comment I most often hear is: You will be a spoiler. I cannot overstate my contempt for that view. No political party owns our allegiance; no candidate deserves to be elected because of party affiliation. We get exactly what we deserve in elections and, for the most part, it is mediocrity, waffling and gutlessness.
I would wear the title of spoiler proudly if I ran competitively and lost. But that’s the
rub – How can I run competitively without money, and why would I run when the will of the people is to continue business as usual, notwithstanding their complaints?
I have decided that I am not, nor do I aspire to be, a politician and, therefore, I will no longer be part of this race.
Does that mean I am checking out – giving up? No. I will continue to be a citizen engaged in doing what I can. I will write, teach, support, and contribute to those causes I find most worthy. I will volunteer. I will inform myself. I will speak out. And I urge you to join me.
Here are three issues about which few politicians are talking but which are vital to the survival of our democracy:
Public Financing of Elections. The Durbin-Specter Bill in the Senate is a start toward campaign finance reform. Those qualifying for public support would be able to invoke the “fair fight” provision if an opponent, not publicly financed, outspends them. The Bill provides money for purchase of media. If each candidate had a million dollars to spend, how effectively he or she spent it would help us decide how effectively he or she would spend our money if elected. As long as elections are auctions, we can forget about change.
Military Spending and Education. The Pentagon’s budget at the start of the Bush administration was approximately $300 billion. It is now over $720 billion with most of the cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars “off budget.” Is profligate military spending really our top priority? Are we safer for these expenditures? Is the United States policy of selling arms to the world (recently $30 billion to Israel and $20 billion to Saudi Arabia and Egypt) a wise and prudent policy? Should we be shocked and appalled when the people to whom we sell arms use them on each other – or on us?
I believe that our spending priorities on military and education should be reversed. We spend 10 times more on the military than on education. If we want to be safe, have jobs, be successful, and pursue happiness collectively, then we ought to emphasize education, not military force. I propose block grants for education to the states in the billions. States would control how the money is spent, but the goal should be affordable academic or technical education for every person who is willing to learn.
Health. Private insurance is without question the wrong model for universal public health care. The way the insurance companies make money is first, to insure only healthy people, then to take your premium, invest your premium, and deny your claim. What we need is universal, single payer, not-for-profit, national health care in which the government sets the rates and administers the program with no exclusions. It’s not that we have to develop such a program out of whole cloth. We already pay 60% of the costs of our health care through Medicare, Medicaid, Veteran’s services and hospitals, and community programs for people the insurance companies have rejected. Germany has done it for 125 years, Canada for 40. And indeed, every industrialized nation in the world except the United States has figured out the solution long ago. We spend $2.4 trillion a year on medical care, a third of that goes to the administration, advertizing and salaries of the insurance industry, and 47 million of us have no insurance at all.
I don’t know what will inspire us to our democratic duty. We have suffered the most egregious insults to our Democracy —- and still we are quiet.
This I do know. We must hold our political leaders accountable. We must demand that they lead, that they tell us the hard truths we don’t want to hear, that they be courageous and be morally strong.
In a Democracy the government belongs to the people. It’s about time all of us started acting like citizens.
