The Tragic Stretch

Sometimes I think of American decency as a rubber band. That is to say that once it is stretched to the limit, it may never go back to its original shape. And sometimes it might not go back to any recognizable shape.

At other, more positive times, I think of our more decent moral foundations as rocks along a wild seashore. Flood tides may cover them, but comes the ebb and they break the surface and stand again in all their strength and glory.

For example. It was my luck to have served in the United States Navy during the high tide of disdain for the military. Having lived through it, I figured, at the time, that it was a permanent trend. No, the tide receded following America’s withdrawal from Vietnam and a long period of respect has followed. Of course, feelings come easy when, for more than 99 percent of Americans, serving your country during war or peace is merely a vague and fuzzy abstraction. It is something that other people and other people’s children do for us.

The point is that our perspectives and attitudes seem to change with time, or do they? I think it was Thomas Hobbes who said, “Our passions don’t change. Only the objects of our passions change.” If this is true, does it mean that our passions are consistent, but guide us toward changing goals? That may have some kinship with the beliefs of William James, the so-called “Father of American psychology.” He was reported to have said, “We don’t sing because we’re happy. We’re happy because we sing.”

This makes me tend more toward the rubber-band theory of moral and ethical behavior. America, it seems to me, is governed at this time by a large group (actually a modest but consistent percentage) of political scoundrels led by a man without a shred of social decency, moral compassion, or ethical underpinnings. Has he stretched our sense of propriety to the point from which it may never return? I fear so.

In the 1950s and 1950s, we discriminated against minorities and women, blew up recruiting centers, assassinated our leaders, destroyed legally constituted political conventions, bombed countries that had never made a threatening gesture toward America, illegally sold arms to a country that had, and murdered college students, among other disdainful acts.

These seemed, in most cases, to have sparked some sense of moral outrage. That had begun to create positive change. Then a likeable old presidential contender chose to announce his candidacy in the southern city where four civil rights workers have been murdered by racist thugs. The message was tragically clear: “Hey, vote for me. I hate the same people you do.”

Out passions—our ugliest passions—perhaps did not change as much as they were legitimatized. We didn’t change immediately. But our moral high-water mark was the election of an African-American president. Passions that stank like rotten garbage rose like Sci Fi monsters of the Cold War films. That led us to the current situation.

Where is the moral outrage this time? It’s there. Those passions for morality, ethical behavior, compassion, peace, love, and harmony are there. It just seems that the power junta has figured out new methods of neutralizing our outrage. They have done it and continue to do it. Our band of righteousness is being stretched beyond its limits by greed, avarice, misogyny, bigotry, and an unquenchable thirst for power.

I question whether we can snap back from it this time.