Letter 2 America for January 31, 2014

Dear America,

The State of the Union Address is now history, in a manner of speaking; it wasn't really historic in its scope or depth.  However, it did serve as an itemization of the issues ahead of us...at least those that will be preeminent in the two most imminent election cycles.  A gauntlet has been thrown down by The President as the surrogate of the Democratic Party as a whole.  But while the issues have been specified in a manner of speaking, the solutions continue to be little more than an ethereal mist hanging over the political arena, or perhaps more aptly, a toxic miasma.  The President offered a few glimpses of what we might do if we are serious about reducing the depth and width of the gap between the rich and the poor, but there is something half-hearted about his pronouncements of both the problems and the remedies.  Preschool education might well benefit children as they become adults, but I suspect that the statistics on the subject would yield an impetus that is more targeted than the "universal pre-k" that President Obama is advocating.  And his proposals to change the tax code so as to reward bringing jobs back to this country and penalize those who do the reverse makes great sense as does eliminating the tax rate that favors investment income over earned.  But such measures do not eliminate the problems we have as a capitalist society for a variety of reasons.  Economists talk about "structural" problems when they analyze our current straits, but structural doesn't go near deep enough. 

With regard to preschool education for all and changes in our attitude toward parenting skills, it may be useful to start all children's educations earlier, though I personally have my doubts, and it would certainly be useful to mentor parents as to how to teach their children to control themselves and exhibit some self-discipline, but the question of whether that will solve any of our problems will remain open even if related programs can be legislated and implemented.  And reducing teen pregnancy and the ever increasing acceptability of child bearing outside of marriage may play a role in the deterioration of some of our social institutions, but those things are matters of personal choice and as such, they defy legislative alteration.  Besides, who is to say that those things are problems that need to be addressed.  The American creed, if there is such a thing, is constantly changing as a result of our political and personal freedom.  We see signs of that change in every facet of national life from the advent of the acceptance of children born out of wedlock to the approval nationwide of same-sex marriage and the legalization of marijuana.  In our politics, that change is an issue--perhaps the issue--and thus, those who exemplify the classical definition of the reactionary pit themselves against the progressive left on the premise that such things are axiomatically political issues, but are they.  If they are, it is paradoxical that teen pregnancy has declined over the past decade or two, concurrently with a profound liberalization of our society's tolerance for abortion, single parenthood and premarital, or non-marital sex.  AIDS has become less of a problem, in this country at least, despite the ever increasing tolerance for homosexuality and heterosexual cohabitation without benefit of marriage...if marriage is a benefit in the first place, and that may be the crux of the matter.  Our Judeo-Christian origins, which inject God into the commencement of every session of congress and require a supplication for God's blessing at the end of every State of the Union address, don't seem to be the guiding light that they used to be.  Whether cynicism or social evolution, or something else altogether is the impetus in that direction, it is overtly evident that our society no longer cleaves rigorously to the fundamentals that once defined virtue for us.  The deistic positivism of the past is just that: a historical fact but one that is no longer definitive in America, and whether one believes that it represents decay or progress or something in between, the evanescence of the kind of absolute morality and positivistic value systems is upon us, and it is here to stay.

So, the suggestion that we can address the lack of upward mobility in our society--which has recently been documented to be, like our health care system, not quite the envy of the rest of the world that we have always presumed it to be--by buttressing adherence to those antiquated, perhaps even quaint, prescriptions for a good life may well be misguided.  Perhaps what we need to consider is that reality, not our economic reality but our social reality, has changed for good, and what we have now in the way of social mores is what we will be living with for the foreseeable future.  On that basis, the change we seek must be geared more to coping with and anticipating the future rather than attempting to reprise the past.

So, given that perspective, what should we be doing to facilitate the egalitarian ideal that we have always believed to be our preeminent value, which belief is being undermined by the ever-more-rapid vitiation of our illusions about our form of capitalism.  What should we do to make access to prosperity as universal as we want to believe it is.  About that I have some strong opinions, and I will be glad to share them with you next time, but they don't entail much of what President Obama said Tuesday night.  The course to where we want to go is much more direct in my opinion; it will require less dogma and more common sense.

Your friend,

Mike