by Walter Cronkite and David Krieger
Published on Tuesday, December 4, 2007 by CommonDreams.org
The American people no longer support the war in Iraq. The war is being carried on by a stubborn president who, like Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon during the Vietnam War, does not want to lose. But from the beginning this has been an ill-considered and poorly prosecuted war that, like the Vietnam War, has diminished respect for America. We believe Mr. Bush would like to drag the war on long enough to hand it off to another president.
The war in Iraq reminds us of the tragedy of the Vietnam War. Both wars began with false assertions by the president to the American people and the Congress. Like Vietnam, the Iraq War has introduced a new vocabulary: “shock and awe,” “mission accomplished,” “the surge.” Like Vietnam, we have destroyed cities in order to save them. It is not a strategy for success.
The Bush administration has attempted to forestall ending the war by putting in more troops, but more troops will not solve the problem. We have lost the hearts and minds of most of the Iraqi people, and victory no longer seems to be even a remote possibility. It is time to end our occupation of Iraq, and bring our troops home.
This war has had only limited body counts. There are reports that more than one million Iraqis have died in the war. These reports cannot be corroborated because the US military does not make public the number of the Iraqi dead and injured. There are also reports that some four million Iraqis have been displaced and are refugees either abroad or within their own country. Iraqis with the resources to leave the country have left. They are frightened. They don’t trust the US, its allies or its mercenaries to protect them and their interests.
We know more about the body counts of American soldiers in Iraq. Some 4,000 American soldiers have been killed in this war, about a third more than the number of people who died in the terrorist attacks of 9/11. And some 28,000 American soldiers have suffered debilitating injuries. Many more have been affected by the trauma of war in ways that they will have to live with for the rest of their lives - ways that will have serious effects not only on their lives and the lives of their loved ones, but on society as a whole. Due to woefully inadequate resources being provided, our injured soldiers are not receiving the medical treatment and mental health care that they deserve.
The invasion of Iraq was illegal from the start. Not only was Congress lied to in order to secure its support for the invasion of Iraq, but the war lacked the support of the United Nations Security Council and thus was an aggressive war initiated on the false pretenses of weapons of mass destruction. There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Nor has any assertion of a relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda proven to be true. In the end, democracy has not come to Iraq. Its government is still being forced to bend to the will of the US administration.
What the war has accomplished is the undermining of US credibility throughout the world, the weakening of our military forces, and the erosion of our Bill of Rights. Nobel Laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz calculates that the war is costing American tax payers more than $1 trillion. This amount could double if we continue the war. Each minute we are spending $500,000 in Iraq. Our losses are incalculable. It is time to remove our military forces from Iraq.
We must ask ourselves whether continuing to pursue this war is benefiting the American people or weakening us. We must ask whether continuing the war is benefiting the Iraqi people or inflicting greater suffering upon them. We believe the answer to these inquiries is that both the American and Iraqi people would benefit by ending the US military presence in Iraq.
Moving forward is not complicated, but it will require courage. Step one is to proceed with the rapid withdrawal of US troops from Iraq and hand over the responsibility for the security of Iraq to Iraqi forces. Step two is to remove our military bases from Iraq and to turn Iraqi oil over to Iraqis. Step three is to provide resources to the Iraqis to rebuild the infrastructure that has been destroyed in the war.
Congress must act. Although Congress never declared war, as required by the Constitution, they did give the president the authority to invade Iraq. Congress must now withdraw that authority and cease its funding of the war.
It is not likely, however, that Congress will act unless the American people make their voices heard with unmistakable clarity. That is the way the Vietnam War was brought to an end. It is the way that the Iraq War will also be brought to an end. The only question is whether it will be now, or whether the war will drag on, with all the suffering that implies, to an even more tragic, costly and degrading defeat. We will be a better, stronger and more decent country to bring the troops home now.
Walter Cronkite is the former long-time anchor for CBS Evening News. David Krieger is President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.
Friday, December 7, 2007
Tuesday, September 25, 2007
Walter Cronkite on Orwell's "1984"
Preface to the 1984 edition
American reporters, given a glimpse of Ayatollah Khomeini's Iran at the end of 1982, were saying it was like 1984. It's Orwellian, one added.
"Big Brother" has become a common term for ubiquitous or overreaching authority, and "Newspeak" is a word we apply to the dehumanizing babble of bureaucracies and computer programs.
Those coinages have passed into the language with lives of their own. They are familiar to millions who have never read 1984, who may not even know it as a novel written thirty-five years ago by English socialist Eric Blair, who became famous under the pen name George Orwell.
Seldom has a book provided a greater wealth of symbols for its age and for the generations to follow, and seldom have literary symbols been invested with such power. How is that? Because they were so useful, and because the features of the world he drew, outlandish as they were, also were familiar.
They are familiar today, they were familiar when the book was first published in 1949. We've met Big Brother in Stalin and Hitler and Khomeini. We hear Newspeak in every use of language to manipulate, deceive, to cover harsh realities with the soft snow of euphemism. And every time a political leader expects or demands that we believe the absurd, we experience that mental process Orwell called doublethink. From the show trials of the pre-war Soviet Union to the dungeon courts of post-revolutionary Iran, 1984's vision of justice as foregone conclusion is familiar to us all. As soon as we were introduced to such things, we realized we had always known them.
What Orwell had done was not to foresee the future but to see the implications of the present--his present and ours--and he touched a common chord. He had given words and shapes to common but unarticulated fears running deep through all industrial societies.
George Orwell was no prophet, and those who busy themselves keeping score on his predictions and grading his use of the crystal ball miss the point. While here he is a novelist, be is also a sharp political essayist and a satirist with a bite not felt in the English language since the work of Jonathan Swift.
If not prophecy, what was 1984? It was, as many have noticed, a warning: a warning about the future of human freedom in a world where political organization and technology can manufacture power in dimensions that would have stunned the imaginations of earlier ages.
Orwell drew upon the technology (and perhaps some of the science fiction) of the day in drawing his picture of 1984. But it was not a work of science fiction he was writing. It was a novelistic essay on power, how it is acquired and maintained, how those who seek it or seek to keep it tend to sacrifice anything and everything in its name.
1984 is an anguished lament and a warning that we may not be strong enough nor wise enough nor moral enough to cope with the kind of power we have learned to amass. That warning vibrates powerfully when we allow ourselves to sit still and think carefully about orbiting satellites that can read the license plates in a parking lot and computers that can tap into thousands of telephone calls and telex transmissions at once and other computers that can do our banking and purchasing, can watch the house and tell a monitoring station what television program we are watching and how many people there are in the room. We think of Orwell when we read of scientists who believe they have located in the human brain the seats of behavioral emotions like aggression, or learn more about the vast potential of genetic engineering.
And we hear echoes of that warning chord in the constant demand for greater security and comfort, for less risk in our societies. We recognize, however dimly, that greater efficiency, ease, and security may come at a substantial price in freedom, that law and order can be a doublethink version of oppression, that individual liberties surrendered for whatever good reason are freedom lost.
Critics and scholars may argue quite legitimately about the particular literary merits of 1984. But none can deny its power, its hold on the imaginations of whole generations, nor the power of its admonitions ... a power that seems to grow rather than lessen with the passage of time. It has been said that 1984 fails as a prophecy because it succeeded as a warning--Orwell's terrible vision has been averted. Well, that kind of self-congratulation is, to say the least, premature. 1984 may not arrive on time, but there's always 1985.
Still, the warning has been effective; and every time we use one of those catch phrases ... recognize Big Brother in someone, see a 1984 in our future ... notice something Orwellian ... we are listening to that warning again.
Walter Cronkite for President!
Franklin Thomas for vice President!
Saturday, September 22, 2007
from "The Challenges of Change" - Change or Revolution?
CHANGE OR REVOLUTION
There are a lot of things wrong with this world we've made: poverty, ugliness, corruption, intolerance, waste of our resources, pollution of our air and water, urban sprawl, inefficient transportation, outmoded concepts of national sovereignty, the secret society of the establishment elite, power of the military-industrial complex, the atomic era, the population explosion, war. The mere fact that the species has survived so far seems hardly adequate cause for self-applause, nor can we indulge in self-congratulations for our civilization's considerable material and cultural development that has failed to guarantee survival or nurture the bodies and the spirit of all human kind.
If we are to survive and wipe out not only the symptoms, but the causes of injustice and decay, there must be change. There is going to be change. This is inevitable. The quesion that the future asks: What kind of change for the good, the bad, coming rapidly or more slowly, by radical excisement of the old, by amputation and transplant, or mutation?
Some of our institutions have served us well; others served us less than adequately because we have served them poorly. We can believe that we can improve our use of them and thus, bring about a more perfect society. Or we can believe that we must replace them with something new. One of the forms of change is, of course, evolution. The other is revolution, which may or may not be accompanied by violence.
The magnificence of the American system is that it provides for either or both revolution and evolution within its existing framework without the need for violent overthrow of the system itself. Violence not only thwarts the workings of the system but also impedes and distorts the revolution itself.
By transgressing the rights of the majority, violence is a denial of the very civil rights the revolutionists claim for themselves. It is intellectually intolerable that they should attempt to hide under the cloak of the very law, the very system they seek to destroy.
If the violence in our world today is a symptom of the illness against which the intellectual revolts, then consistency demands that he eschew violence in pursuing that revolt. Non-violent revolt is possible, and, indeed, may be desirable' John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. were non-violent revolutionaries. Both preached change, within the system, within the philosophy, within the dream. Their revolutions were to be in men's minds; their weapons, understanding, reason, sustained pressure to achieve their goals.
Their strategy was to conquer totally, yet bloodlessly; to win over the mind, and the heart. They hoped their revolutions would succeed quickly, but they knew they wouldn't. So they compromised, reluctantly but realistically, concentrating their revolutionary zeal on an effort to bring about evolutionary change. They knew, as another revolutionist, Thomas Lawrence--the Lawrence of Arabia--put it: "Progress is not made by the single genius, but by the common people. The genius raids, but the common people occupy and possess."
These men--the President who wanted to lead his nation into a new age, the civil-rights leader who wanted his nation to come of age; and the daring adventurer in seemingly another age all saw that their revolutions needed pragmatism as well as idealism to succeed.
Today an entirely different kind of revolution is under way throughout the world. On both sides of the Iron Curtain young people are revolting against the Establishment.
Youth's discontent stems from the same impatience that has motivated each generation when it was young--impatience to get on with the obvious reforms that the Establishment seems reluctant to institute.
With the world's present potential for mass suicide with nuclear weapons and the apparent inability of the Establishment to control it, is there any wonder that the students of today rebel with an urgency unknown to earlier generations?
The Vietnam war goes on, human beings at the grim game of slaughter, while the diplomats plow their ponderous way in Paris. After a few thousand years of so-called civilization, it seems that there ought to be a better way. That, I suggest, is part of what young people are saying--there ought to be a better way.
Trying to draw a parallel between the rebels here and abroad isn't a fruitful exercise because the United States possesses to a unique degree the twin assets of democracy: the acceptance of dissent and the assurance of responsive, and, so far, responsible change. It is against these two elements that we must weigh today's rebellion in our country.
When does dissent go beyond the bounds of reasonable criticism and become a danger to the survival of the society that nurtured it? And if it does go that far, what should society do about it?
Our Constitution guarantees freedom of speech under the First Amendment. The courts remind us that this freedom is not unlimited, even if the Constitution says it is. "The abuses of freedom of speech," as Benjamin Franklin noted, "ought to be repressed." "But," he asked, "to whom are we to commit the power of doing it?" His question remains unanswered today after almost 200 years.
But if dissent applies to acts of conscience, as most of us seem to think it does, should society allow unlimited civil, or even criminal disobedience? If initial dissent does not produce a responsive change, say, in the conduct of a war, should we, as citizens, be entitled then to sabotage the war efforts?
Speaking outside the court, Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas declared recently that "civil disobedience is never justified in our nation when the law being violated is not itself the target of the protest." Furthermore, as he and others have argued, as long as the government Constitutionally protects the right to criticize, outright rebellion and wanton destruction can never be construed as legitimate dissent.
Some dissident student leaders argue that democracy does not exist for them at their universities; that their rebellion must be total, aimed at completely paralyzing and over-turning the existing leadership. They do not realize, or they choose to ignore, just how much freedom they possess today in the United States-which, despite some abuse, still compares favorably with that enjoyed by any other students in any other country, at this, or any other, time in history.
Furthermore, as Dr. Sidney Hook, of NYU's Department of Philosophy, points out: academic freedom is not, as many think, freedom of the students to learn what they please; it's freedom of the universities to decide what to teach, and how to teach it. This is the academic freedom that universities have been sheltering for many centuries--freedom from outside pressures, not freedom for inside pressure groups.
The freedom for which we all should be fighting is the freedom of free inquiry, the freedom to study our democratic institutions without fear of harassment by misguided patriots, the freedom to advocate change without facing trial for heresy.
To determine what we keep, what we change, and what we discard, we must pursue full and open inquiry, which may require throwing off old concepts and shibboleths in the spirit of basic research.
THE PROBLEMS WE FACE
by Walter Cronkite - Address at Williamsburg, Virginia, February 3, 1968.
It is not difficult to find analogies to the days just two hundred years ago when Virginia's House of Burgesses met in Williamsburg to consider the crushing nature of the crown across the sea.
Our problems today seem far more complex than those that disturbed the colonists. Perhaps they are. If so, they demand even greater dedication, courage and resolve than the considerable quantities of these attributes displayed by the early patriots of Virginia.
As we plunge headlong toward the 21st Century, let us consider the inescapable crux of all the problems that are facing us.
How, with an exploding population and the increasing impingement of each of us on the other, and the necessity of meshing our lives for the greatest comfort of the greatest number, can we preserve the one characteristic without which life is worthless-the human dignity and the freedom of choice of the individual?
We must ask ourselves some hard questions. Have we, for instance, gone too far with civil liberty? A shocking question? Perhaps. But should we not permit ourselves-nay, should we not demand of ourselves-that we examine each question without the pre-conceptions that stifle honest research? -->
We can say to ourselves without embarrassing our democratic traditions: "Surely there is a way to protect the majority against the marauding bands of narcotic-crazed Hell's Angels without infringing on anyone's genuine civil rights, including theirs."
The Supreme Court takes action it believes correct in curtailing abuses of our civil liberties-but where are the original thinkers, the innovators, who can break with old tradition to find a modem answer to modem problems?
It is possible, for instance, that in the crowded conditions of the 20th Century man's civil liberties are going to have to be curtailed for the greater good of the greater number.
It is possible that freedom of individual action permissible when this nation was young and under-populated no longer is permissible as we enter middle-age and are over-populated.
These are radical thoughts, but we must not turn our backs on such problems, nor brand by unsavory names those who would pursue the research into them.
Some day, and the dawn of that day cannot long be held back, we must take a new look at state's rights, not because we believe any less in the principles on which the doctrine was conceived but because we realize that the nature of our nation is changing.
Our fiscal policy is in a shambles, partly because of unnecessary duplication of government. Taxes are duplicated and, what is worse, hidden in an attempt to deceive the people. Efficiency of government is impaired and the machinery overwhelmed by proliferation of government agencies, on both the federal and local levels.
Nor is this tendency restricted to government. Big business itself becomes burdensomely top-heavy as it expands, and the people pay a tax for inefficiency in the form of higher prices.
If it takes top-to-bottom re-structuring of the American system, then we should not be afraid of such radical re-building. That which is sacred in our past does not require lipservice to obsolesence.
We need not so much states rights as human rights, and, of these, economic security and opportunity are high on the list. Without them discontent will fester in the land. But to provide them we cannot suppress ambition nor penalize success.
Place alongside states rights those of personal liberty and national sovereignty. No one desires to surrender any part of those achievements we hold dear and for which we have shed our nation's blood and wealth.
But let's not condemn the dissenters who feel that perhaps we have no choice in 'a world ever more crowded, moving at a speed which is ever increasing. When man learned to fly, he looked to the uncrowded skies to spread his wings and soar with the freedom of the birds. Today he finds himself restricted to air lanes and certain heights and landing patterns. The freedom he admired would bring tragic chaos.
It is not adequate to believe that the standards which were good enough for our fathers are good enough for us. The world, as much as we may deplore the fact, is not the same today as it was when the House of Burgesses met in 1768. As a matter of fact, it is not the same as it was just last year.
In 1940, which seemed turbulent to us at the time but which looks peacefully remote today, there were just 130 million of us. Today there are 200 million.
Where there were two of us trying to find a home, drive down the highway, find a secluded spot of beach, trying to buy a theater ticket-today there are three of us. In another twenty-eight years as we near the turn of the century there will be six of us seeking to occupy that same space that three of us occupy today.
When the founding patriots first sat in Williamsburg there were four persons per square mile in the thirteen colonies. Today there are 56 of us per square mile and by the year 2000 it will be 100 Americans per square mile.
Can we really believe that 1770 solutions are adequate for 1970 problems? If we are to meet our problems, the dissenters who speak revolutionary thoughts must not be stifled. They may have the answer to lead us from the wilderness.
We must dare to dissent from the old adages which have guided us. We must examine with a clinical eye the suppositions on which we have based our society. One of our wise modern philosophers, Marya Mannes, has put forth some of those propositions:
Money buys security. Well, does it? Against crime? Against pollution? Against corruption? Against congestion? Against addiction?
The pursuit of happiness is the great American dream. Whose happiness? Yours or theirs? Can the individual be happy in an unhappy society? Can he remain well in a sick one?
Welfare takes care of the poor. Does it? At what cost to us--and to them?
Democracy and capitalism are the pillars of a free society and therefore morally right. Right for whom? At what stage of development? In what part of the world? Whose morality?
Socialism and communism are morally evil and therefore threaten our existence. Why? Because their ideas are stronger than ours? Because they use force to promote themselves and we do not? Don't we? If we are both strong and morally right, what are we afraid of? These are questions we must ask, and the search for the answers should be unceasing.
A very keen observer of the scientific scene and a philosopher, Lord Ritchie Calder, notes that scientific revolution is the "replacement of one set of propositions that have served practitioners satisfactorily (in spite of anomalies) with a new set." A set of propositions, called a paradigm, provides model problems and solutions, the framework in which science works. He notes that to reject a paradigm--to foment scientific revolution--is to commit a "breach of accepted scientific tradition." Yet the great scientific discoverers have been revolutionaries. They have rejected an important paradigm of their discipline.
In political thought, in the discipline of the political sciences, we must be willing to escape our paradigm, we must listen to those who would escape, we must hear out the dissenters. We must seek out and make use of the original thinkers.
The Nuremberg trials of the Nazi war criminals were an excellent example of original thinking, although the motivation was suspect of revenge. Powerful arguments were made, and are still put forth, that such trials of crimes not previously set forth in international law, were ex post facto, and therefore themselves a crime against a basic principle of modern law-a legal paradigm.
Yet the counter-argument that prevailed represented innovation and a dissent from conformity, necessitated by the current need. It went that the world, in the atomic age, would not have a chance after a third world war to establish legal precedent against future offenders, that the judicial side of any new system of international law would have to establish its own precedent even before the legislative and executive sides of a future international system of order came into being.
The tragedy, of course, is that twenty-two years after Nuremberg the other parts of that international system are still but a gleam in our eyes, but that is not the fault of the jurists who have given us a body of precedent against war crimes when we grow wise enough to apply it.
Now today we find some who dissent from our current war raising the precedent of Nuremberg to claim the individual's rights to decide when war is justified. There is considerable question whether they have read well the documentation of Nuremberg and its findings, but there is a concept here that should not be lightly dismissed merely because it flies in the face of our conventional view of patriotism. It is dissent and dissent must be given consideration no matter bow revolting.
For, interestingly enough, "revolting" and "revolution" come from the same Latin word. And to be revolutionary in attacking our problems of today and tomorrow is not to deny our American heritage, the heritage of the patriots who once met here, but to honor it.
Indeed, to refuse to recognize the need for revolution is the ultimate denial of the principles for which the distinguished Virginia forefathers risked so much, offering even to lay down their lives.
We are now in a scientific revolution. In the life span of the youngest member of this audience we have sped through three eras-the atomic age, the computer age, the space age, and now we stand on the threshold of the most revolutionary of them all, the DNA age--the unlocking of the very secret of life, of what makes us what we are. We soon will have the frightening knowledge of how to make man any way we want him-smart or stupid, tall or short, black or white.
In the next thirty years the transplant of human organs will be commonplace, the birthrate will be controlled, we will be exploring and perhaps colonizing the ocean floor. Can anyone deny that a political revolution will accompany that scientific revolution?
We have the future in our power. The 21st Century will not burst upon us in full flower. We can mold it to be what man wants it to be. But to do that we must know what we want, and we must examine each of our institutions to determine whether they stand up to the challenges of the century ahead.
We may have to look no further than our own failure to plan for this future to find the seeds of youth's discontent. Convinced that we are not doing the job, they are turning their backs upon us. And lest they reject that which is good of our institutions and that accumulated wisdom which we possess solely by reason of age, we must not reject these youthful dissenters. In youth's rebellion we must assist, not resist.
Society is going to change. The only question is whether we are going to help. Not short of death can we avoid being a part of the human parade. The question is: where will we be in it? Up toward the front, carrying the banner? Swept along somewhere in the middle? Or perhaps trampled under foot as it marches over us en route to the future?
Our help is needed. While our way of life will change, we need to communicate, by word and deed, the values we know are constants--right or wrong, truth or falsehood, generosity or selfishness, dedication or cynicism, self-discipline or license.
The ferment aboard today in the land borders on anarchy, and there are fearful calls for law and order. But as surely as a boiling kettle will not stop generating steam just because a lid is clamped on it, our ferment cannot be suppressed by tanks and guns.
Far better than suppressing ferment, how about handling it the American way-how about channeling it toward a betterment and modernization of this society for the good of all? Why not use that steam to turn the lathes on which we can burnish away our self-doubts, polish our patriotism to a new brilliance and fashion a new American spirit. But to do that we must listen to the dissenters. And we must begin now. There is no time to lose.
Only by opening our eyes and ears, our hearts and our minds can we arrest the trend toward turmoil, doubt, suspicion, frustration-but arrest it we must before a whole generation swept up by it, is asked by inevitable mortality to assume the mantle of leadership.
We are told that hippy children hate their parents because they have been given too much, because we have denied them the joys of struggle and so have denied them the sweetest fruit of all-the taste of victory. If this is our sin it should be viewed with compassion. We can be forgiven for failing to understand that we should pretend poverty to assure the right conditions of growth for off-spring. The sin is inherent in an affluent society.
But there is a solution which takes advantage of our material wealth. With this wealth and our technological advances we can free the new generation from the hours of toil once required merely to assure minimum sustenance.
We would substitute education--education, not just training that turns out cogs for the industrial machine. Education which would prepare them to meet the challenges of their time, the challenge to all humankind. We would make it possible for all men, freed from daily drudgery, to think, and to give public service.
We could inspire man to think of the problems, to seek solutions, to give of their new-found time freely and gladly. We might even earn their gratitude for giving them this guidance to the task ahead and for creating the environment that would bring forth a new nation to meet 21st Century problems with the same vigor, imagination and constructive use of dissent that did the first convention here in meeting the 19th Century's challenge.
And so we find again in our search for the future the thread to the past. For isn't this the core of the greatness of Virginia? Why were the men whose foresight we praise to this day so omniscient? Because they were the educated men of their day, born and trained to public service. Yet in the economy of two centuries ago they were a small class.
What wonders we might accomplish in shaping the next century if a whole nation were educated, born and trained to public service! A nation of Jeffersons and Randolphs and Lees and Flemings and Carters and Henrys-is that really so wild a dream?
At 22, Thomas Jefferson stood outside the House of Burgesses and listened to Patrick Henry and, as Jefferson later wrote, be was inspired to read and ponder.
Presently youth is listening outside our doors but is it being inspired to ponder? Are we inspiring youth to turn off and turn away, or to come in and join the discussion of their future and ours?
In his excellent book Seat of Empire, Carl Bridenbaugh says of the patriots who first met here: "Their equality and status questioned, even threatened, the now united gentry became radicals, gentlemen revolutionists. They revolted to preserve what they had."
If we are to preserve what we have we must lead or at least join the revolution. Let our new gentry become radicals and seek bold new solutions to our problems.
This country has not lost its ability to respond to challenge, and while the challenges of today seem frightening in their complexity, there is no reason for despair. The more and the greater the challenges, the greater the heroism of thought, deed and courage to surmount them-and the more exciting the prospect of the combat.
America can find sustenance and inspiration by looking again at not what we were but what we are.
more from The Challenges of Change
There are a lot of things wrong with this world we've made: poverty, ugliness, corruption, intolerance, waste of our resources, pollution of our air and water, urban sprawl, inefficient transportation, outmoded concepts of national sovereignty, the secret society of the establishment elite, power of the military-industrial complex, the atomic era, the population explosion, war. The mere fact that the species has survived so far seems hardly adequate cause for self-applause, nor can we indulge in self-congratulations for our civilization's considerable material and cultural development that has failed to guarantee survival or nurture the bodies and the spirit of all human kind.
If we are to survive and wipe out not only the symptoms, but the causes of injustice and decay, there must be change. There is going to be change. This is inevitable. The quesion that the future asks: What kind of change for the good, the bad, coming rapidly or more slowly, by radical excisement of the old, by amputation and transplant, or mutation?
Some of our institutions have served us well; others served us less than adequately because we have served them poorly. We can believe that we can improve our use of them and thus, bring about a more perfect society. Or we can believe that we must replace them with something new. One of the forms of change is, of course, evolution. The other is revolution, which may or may not be accompanied by violence.
The magnificence of the American system is that it provides for either or both revolution and evolution within its existing framework without the need for violent overthrow of the system itself. Violence not only thwarts the workings of the system but also impedes and distorts the revolution itself.
By transgressing the rights of the majority, violence is a denial of the very civil rights the revolutionists claim for themselves. It is intellectually intolerable that they should attempt to hide under the cloak of the very law, the very system they seek to destroy.
If the violence in our world today is a symptom of the illness against which the intellectual revolts, then consistency demands that he eschew violence in pursuing that revolt. Non-violent revolt is possible, and, indeed, may be desirable' John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. were non-violent revolutionaries. Both preached change, within the system, within the philosophy, within the dream. Their revolutions were to be in men's minds; their weapons, understanding, reason, sustained pressure to achieve their goals.
Their strategy was to conquer totally, yet bloodlessly; to win over the mind, and the heart. They hoped their revolutions would succeed quickly, but they knew they wouldn't. So they compromised, reluctantly but realistically, concentrating their revolutionary zeal on an effort to bring about evolutionary change. They knew, as another revolutionist, Thomas Lawrence--the Lawrence of Arabia--put it: "Progress is not made by the single genius, but by the common people. The genius raids, but the common people occupy and possess."
These men--the President who wanted to lead his nation into a new age, the civil-rights leader who wanted his nation to come of age; and the daring adventurer in seemingly another age all saw that their revolutions needed pragmatism as well as idealism to succeed.
Today an entirely different kind of revolution is under way throughout the world. On both sides of the Iron Curtain young people are revolting against the Establishment.
Youth's discontent stems from the same impatience that has motivated each generation when it was young--impatience to get on with the obvious reforms that the Establishment seems reluctant to institute.
With the world's present potential for mass suicide with nuclear weapons and the apparent inability of the Establishment to control it, is there any wonder that the students of today rebel with an urgency unknown to earlier generations?
The Vietnam war goes on, human beings at the grim game of slaughter, while the diplomats plow their ponderous way in Paris. After a few thousand years of so-called civilization, it seems that there ought to be a better way. That, I suggest, is part of what young people are saying--there ought to be a better way.
Trying to draw a parallel between the rebels here and abroad isn't a fruitful exercise because the United States possesses to a unique degree the twin assets of democracy: the acceptance of dissent and the assurance of responsive, and, so far, responsible change. It is against these two elements that we must weigh today's rebellion in our country.
When does dissent go beyond the bounds of reasonable criticism and become a danger to the survival of the society that nurtured it? And if it does go that far, what should society do about it?
Our Constitution guarantees freedom of speech under the First Amendment. The courts remind us that this freedom is not unlimited, even if the Constitution says it is. "The abuses of freedom of speech," as Benjamin Franklin noted, "ought to be repressed." "But," he asked, "to whom are we to commit the power of doing it?" His question remains unanswered today after almost 200 years.
But if dissent applies to acts of conscience, as most of us seem to think it does, should society allow unlimited civil, or even criminal disobedience? If initial dissent does not produce a responsive change, say, in the conduct of a war, should we, as citizens, be entitled then to sabotage the war efforts?
Speaking outside the court, Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas declared recently that "civil disobedience is never justified in our nation when the law being violated is not itself the target of the protest." Furthermore, as he and others have argued, as long as the government Constitutionally protects the right to criticize, outright rebellion and wanton destruction can never be construed as legitimate dissent.
Some dissident student leaders argue that democracy does not exist for them at their universities; that their rebellion must be total, aimed at completely paralyzing and over-turning the existing leadership. They do not realize, or they choose to ignore, just how much freedom they possess today in the United States-which, despite some abuse, still compares favorably with that enjoyed by any other students in any other country, at this, or any other, time in history.
Furthermore, as Dr. Sidney Hook, of NYU's Department of Philosophy, points out: academic freedom is not, as many think, freedom of the students to learn what they please; it's freedom of the universities to decide what to teach, and how to teach it. This is the academic freedom that universities have been sheltering for many centuries--freedom from outside pressures, not freedom for inside pressure groups.
The freedom for which we all should be fighting is the freedom of free inquiry, the freedom to study our democratic institutions without fear of harassment by misguided patriots, the freedom to advocate change without facing trial for heresy.
To determine what we keep, what we change, and what we discard, we must pursue full and open inquiry, which may require throwing off old concepts and shibboleths in the spirit of basic research.
THE PROBLEMS WE FACE
by Walter Cronkite - Address at Williamsburg, Virginia, February 3, 1968.
It is not difficult to find analogies to the days just two hundred years ago when Virginia's House of Burgesses met in Williamsburg to consider the crushing nature of the crown across the sea.
Our problems today seem far more complex than those that disturbed the colonists. Perhaps they are. If so, they demand even greater dedication, courage and resolve than the considerable quantities of these attributes displayed by the early patriots of Virginia.
As we plunge headlong toward the 21st Century, let us consider the inescapable crux of all the problems that are facing us.
How, with an exploding population and the increasing impingement of each of us on the other, and the necessity of meshing our lives for the greatest comfort of the greatest number, can we preserve the one characteristic without which life is worthless-the human dignity and the freedom of choice of the individual?
We must ask ourselves some hard questions. Have we, for instance, gone too far with civil liberty? A shocking question? Perhaps. But should we not permit ourselves-nay, should we not demand of ourselves-that we examine each question without the pre-conceptions that stifle honest research? -->
We can say to ourselves without embarrassing our democratic traditions: "Surely there is a way to protect the majority against the marauding bands of narcotic-crazed Hell's Angels without infringing on anyone's genuine civil rights, including theirs."
The Supreme Court takes action it believes correct in curtailing abuses of our civil liberties-but where are the original thinkers, the innovators, who can break with old tradition to find a modem answer to modem problems?
It is possible, for instance, that in the crowded conditions of the 20th Century man's civil liberties are going to have to be curtailed for the greater good of the greater number.
It is possible that freedom of individual action permissible when this nation was young and under-populated no longer is permissible as we enter middle-age and are over-populated.
These are radical thoughts, but we must not turn our backs on such problems, nor brand by unsavory names those who would pursue the research into them.
Some day, and the dawn of that day cannot long be held back, we must take a new look at state's rights, not because we believe any less in the principles on which the doctrine was conceived but because we realize that the nature of our nation is changing.
Our fiscal policy is in a shambles, partly because of unnecessary duplication of government. Taxes are duplicated and, what is worse, hidden in an attempt to deceive the people. Efficiency of government is impaired and the machinery overwhelmed by proliferation of government agencies, on both the federal and local levels.
Nor is this tendency restricted to government. Big business itself becomes burdensomely top-heavy as it expands, and the people pay a tax for inefficiency in the form of higher prices.
If it takes top-to-bottom re-structuring of the American system, then we should not be afraid of such radical re-building. That which is sacred in our past does not require lipservice to obsolesence.
We need not so much states rights as human rights, and, of these, economic security and opportunity are high on the list. Without them discontent will fester in the land. But to provide them we cannot suppress ambition nor penalize success.
Place alongside states rights those of personal liberty and national sovereignty. No one desires to surrender any part of those achievements we hold dear and for which we have shed our nation's blood and wealth.
But let's not condemn the dissenters who feel that perhaps we have no choice in 'a world ever more crowded, moving at a speed which is ever increasing. When man learned to fly, he looked to the uncrowded skies to spread his wings and soar with the freedom of the birds. Today he finds himself restricted to air lanes and certain heights and landing patterns. The freedom he admired would bring tragic chaos.
It is not adequate to believe that the standards which were good enough for our fathers are good enough for us. The world, as much as we may deplore the fact, is not the same today as it was when the House of Burgesses met in 1768. As a matter of fact, it is not the same as it was just last year.
In 1940, which seemed turbulent to us at the time but which looks peacefully remote today, there were just 130 million of us. Today there are 200 million.
Where there were two of us trying to find a home, drive down the highway, find a secluded spot of beach, trying to buy a theater ticket-today there are three of us. In another twenty-eight years as we near the turn of the century there will be six of us seeking to occupy that same space that three of us occupy today.
When the founding patriots first sat in Williamsburg there were four persons per square mile in the thirteen colonies. Today there are 56 of us per square mile and by the year 2000 it will be 100 Americans per square mile.
Can we really believe that 1770 solutions are adequate for 1970 problems? If we are to meet our problems, the dissenters who speak revolutionary thoughts must not be stifled. They may have the answer to lead us from the wilderness.
We must dare to dissent from the old adages which have guided us. We must examine with a clinical eye the suppositions on which we have based our society. One of our wise modern philosophers, Marya Mannes, has put forth some of those propositions:
Money buys security. Well, does it? Against crime? Against pollution? Against corruption? Against congestion? Against addiction?
The pursuit of happiness is the great American dream. Whose happiness? Yours or theirs? Can the individual be happy in an unhappy society? Can he remain well in a sick one?
Welfare takes care of the poor. Does it? At what cost to us--and to them?
Democracy and capitalism are the pillars of a free society and therefore morally right. Right for whom? At what stage of development? In what part of the world? Whose morality?
Socialism and communism are morally evil and therefore threaten our existence. Why? Because their ideas are stronger than ours? Because they use force to promote themselves and we do not? Don't we? If we are both strong and morally right, what are we afraid of? These are questions we must ask, and the search for the answers should be unceasing.
A very keen observer of the scientific scene and a philosopher, Lord Ritchie Calder, notes that scientific revolution is the "replacement of one set of propositions that have served practitioners satisfactorily (in spite of anomalies) with a new set." A set of propositions, called a paradigm, provides model problems and solutions, the framework in which science works. He notes that to reject a paradigm--to foment scientific revolution--is to commit a "breach of accepted scientific tradition." Yet the great scientific discoverers have been revolutionaries. They have rejected an important paradigm of their discipline.
In political thought, in the discipline of the political sciences, we must be willing to escape our paradigm, we must listen to those who would escape, we must hear out the dissenters. We must seek out and make use of the original thinkers.
The Nuremberg trials of the Nazi war criminals were an excellent example of original thinking, although the motivation was suspect of revenge. Powerful arguments were made, and are still put forth, that such trials of crimes not previously set forth in international law, were ex post facto, and therefore themselves a crime against a basic principle of modern law-a legal paradigm.
Yet the counter-argument that prevailed represented innovation and a dissent from conformity, necessitated by the current need. It went that the world, in the atomic age, would not have a chance after a third world war to establish legal precedent against future offenders, that the judicial side of any new system of international law would have to establish its own precedent even before the legislative and executive sides of a future international system of order came into being.
The tragedy, of course, is that twenty-two years after Nuremberg the other parts of that international system are still but a gleam in our eyes, but that is not the fault of the jurists who have given us a body of precedent against war crimes when we grow wise enough to apply it.
Now today we find some who dissent from our current war raising the precedent of Nuremberg to claim the individual's rights to decide when war is justified. There is considerable question whether they have read well the documentation of Nuremberg and its findings, but there is a concept here that should not be lightly dismissed merely because it flies in the face of our conventional view of patriotism. It is dissent and dissent must be given consideration no matter bow revolting.
For, interestingly enough, "revolting" and "revolution" come from the same Latin word. And to be revolutionary in attacking our problems of today and tomorrow is not to deny our American heritage, the heritage of the patriots who once met here, but to honor it.
Indeed, to refuse to recognize the need for revolution is the ultimate denial of the principles for which the distinguished Virginia forefathers risked so much, offering even to lay down their lives.
We are now in a scientific revolution. In the life span of the youngest member of this audience we have sped through three eras-the atomic age, the computer age, the space age, and now we stand on the threshold of the most revolutionary of them all, the DNA age--the unlocking of the very secret of life, of what makes us what we are. We soon will have the frightening knowledge of how to make man any way we want him-smart or stupid, tall or short, black or white.
In the next thirty years the transplant of human organs will be commonplace, the birthrate will be controlled, we will be exploring and perhaps colonizing the ocean floor. Can anyone deny that a political revolution will accompany that scientific revolution?
We have the future in our power. The 21st Century will not burst upon us in full flower. We can mold it to be what man wants it to be. But to do that we must know what we want, and we must examine each of our institutions to determine whether they stand up to the challenges of the century ahead.
We may have to look no further than our own failure to plan for this future to find the seeds of youth's discontent. Convinced that we are not doing the job, they are turning their backs upon us. And lest they reject that which is good of our institutions and that accumulated wisdom which we possess solely by reason of age, we must not reject these youthful dissenters. In youth's rebellion we must assist, not resist.
Society is going to change. The only question is whether we are going to help. Not short of death can we avoid being a part of the human parade. The question is: where will we be in it? Up toward the front, carrying the banner? Swept along somewhere in the middle? Or perhaps trampled under foot as it marches over us en route to the future?
Our help is needed. While our way of life will change, we need to communicate, by word and deed, the values we know are constants--right or wrong, truth or falsehood, generosity or selfishness, dedication or cynicism, self-discipline or license.
The ferment aboard today in the land borders on anarchy, and there are fearful calls for law and order. But as surely as a boiling kettle will not stop generating steam just because a lid is clamped on it, our ferment cannot be suppressed by tanks and guns.
Far better than suppressing ferment, how about handling it the American way-how about channeling it toward a betterment and modernization of this society for the good of all? Why not use that steam to turn the lathes on which we can burnish away our self-doubts, polish our patriotism to a new brilliance and fashion a new American spirit. But to do that we must listen to the dissenters. And we must begin now. There is no time to lose.
Only by opening our eyes and ears, our hearts and our minds can we arrest the trend toward turmoil, doubt, suspicion, frustration-but arrest it we must before a whole generation swept up by it, is asked by inevitable mortality to assume the mantle of leadership.
We are told that hippy children hate their parents because they have been given too much, because we have denied them the joys of struggle and so have denied them the sweetest fruit of all-the taste of victory. If this is our sin it should be viewed with compassion. We can be forgiven for failing to understand that we should pretend poverty to assure the right conditions of growth for off-spring. The sin is inherent in an affluent society.
But there is a solution which takes advantage of our material wealth. With this wealth and our technological advances we can free the new generation from the hours of toil once required merely to assure minimum sustenance.
We would substitute education--education, not just training that turns out cogs for the industrial machine. Education which would prepare them to meet the challenges of their time, the challenge to all humankind. We would make it possible for all men, freed from daily drudgery, to think, and to give public service.
We could inspire man to think of the problems, to seek solutions, to give of their new-found time freely and gladly. We might even earn their gratitude for giving them this guidance to the task ahead and for creating the environment that would bring forth a new nation to meet 21st Century problems with the same vigor, imagination and constructive use of dissent that did the first convention here in meeting the 19th Century's challenge.
And so we find again in our search for the future the thread to the past. For isn't this the core of the greatness of Virginia? Why were the men whose foresight we praise to this day so omniscient? Because they were the educated men of their day, born and trained to public service. Yet in the economy of two centuries ago they were a small class.
What wonders we might accomplish in shaping the next century if a whole nation were educated, born and trained to public service! A nation of Jeffersons and Randolphs and Lees and Flemings and Carters and Henrys-is that really so wild a dream?
At 22, Thomas Jefferson stood outside the House of Burgesses and listened to Patrick Henry and, as Jefferson later wrote, be was inspired to read and ponder.
Presently youth is listening outside our doors but is it being inspired to ponder? Are we inspiring youth to turn off and turn away, or to come in and join the discussion of their future and ours?
In his excellent book Seat of Empire, Carl Bridenbaugh says of the patriots who first met here: "Their equality and status questioned, even threatened, the now united gentry became radicals, gentlemen revolutionists. They revolted to preserve what they had."
If we are to preserve what we have we must lead or at least join the revolution. Let our new gentry become radicals and seek bold new solutions to our problems.
This country has not lost its ability to respond to challenge, and while the challenges of today seem frightening in their complexity, there is no reason for despair. The more and the greater the challenges, the greater the heroism of thought, deed and courage to surmount them-and the more exciting the prospect of the combat.
America can find sustenance and inspiration by looking again at not what we were but what we are.
more from The Challenges of Change
Sunday, March 25, 2007
Who would you choose if you could ask ANYONE to be president?
We could get better results from our presidential selection process if we were to look beyond those who promote themselves and elect candidates who most people agree would be a good or great choice.
Our presidential selection process is not working well
We have a process that only considers those who are effective at promoting themselves. We are not getting good results.
We could look beyond those who run, to find people who do not or will not promote themselves to office, but who might respond to a draft.
Imagine if the state legislatures [just a few or even one(?)] decided to choose Electors to the President by seeking out people who are committed to promoting the national interest more than they are committed to promoting their party interest.
Is there sometimes a divergence of interests between the two "major" parties on the one hand and the nation as a whole on the other? Were the candidates who were nominated by those most oft-mentioned Parties in recent elections among the very best that this nation has to offer?
Because of the particulars of the Presidential selection process laid out in the Constitution, it may take only a very few Electors changing their vote--from one that would reflect a primary allegiance to Party to one reflecting a determination to put national interest first--to result in a changed outcome of an election. Only a few Electors need change because if there is no candidate who receives a majority, they take the top three candidates and let Congress decide, with each State casting one vote.
Walter Cronkite for President!
Franklin Thomas for vice President!
They would do it if we ask. Or if the Electors ask. Pass it on...
The Electors decide
We could look beyond those who run, to find people who do not or will not promote themselves to office, but who might respond to a draft.
Imagine if the state legislatures [just a few or even one(?)] decided to choose Electors to the President by seeking out people who are committed to promoting the national interest more than they are committed to promoting their party interest.
Is there sometimes a divergence of interests between the two "major" parties on the one hand and the nation as a whole on the other? Were the candidates who were nominated by those most oft-mentioned Parties in recent elections among the very best that this nation has to offer?
Because of the particulars of the Presidential selection process laid out in the Constitution, it may take only a very few Electors changing their vote--from one that would reflect a primary allegiance to Party to one reflecting a determination to put national interest first--to result in a changed outcome of an election. Only a few Electors need change because if there is no candidate who receives a majority, they take the top three candidates and let Congress decide, with each State casting one vote.
Walter Cronkite for President!
Franklin Thomas for vice President!
They would do it if we ask. Or if the Electors ask. Pass it on...
The Electors decide
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