2006-05-21
Editorial
Bernard J. Fine
Address to the High School Graduating
Classes of 2006
I can’t imagine what will go on in the head of an 18-year-old who decides to vote in the election next November. It is incomprehensible to me how anyone can judge what the country should be like, can be like, must be like after having lived only during the administrations of G.H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and G.W. Bush and, most likely, never having studied those Presidents and their administrations in depth in high school.
Let me tell you, those three folks aren’t exactly ones that I would consider to be good role models for you.
Let me also tell you about “When I Was a Boy.” I know, that’s terribly boring, but listen up anyway. Your life and the lives of your children and their children may depend on your listening and, I hope, becoming interested in getting better informed than you are about the world around you before you vote. Now, I realize that some of you may already be quite well informed, but I suspect that you are in the minority. If you aren’t very well informed, you have about five months to prepare yourselves to vote intelligently in what may well be one of the most important elections in the history of our country.
I first voted in 1944. I’m not sure what went through my head at the time, but I remember it as a very special occasion. I suspect it was made more so by the fact that Franklin Roosevelt was running for a fourth term, it having been decided by the Democratic Party and Roosevelt that it was unwise to switch presidents in the midst of World War II. [In case you are not aware, it is now law that a President can only serve two four-year terms.]
My father and mother weren’t politically active, but they did vote in every election. My memory goes back to their listening to Franklin Roosevelt’s fireside speeches. These were informal talks that Roosevelt periodically gave to the American people to keep them informed on a variety of topics. The following link connects you with an early Fireside Speech that dealt with the operation of the national banks after Roosevelt was elected in 1932. [When you get to the website below, go to Fireside Speech #1 and click on “download audio.”]
http://millercenter.virginia.edu/scripps/diglibrary/
prezspeeches/roosevelt/
My folks rarely discussed politics with one another, let alone with me. Despite that, looking back, I realize that I had several things going for me in terms of acquiring both a sense of the world about me and a personal code of conduct and ethics.
First of all, I read a great deal when I was a young person and, for some reason, my ears seemed attuned to all that went on around me. I was a great listener; hence I absorbed a great deal of information simply from hearing bits of radio programs and adult conversations here and there. Not all of what I heard made much sense to me at the time I heard it, mind you, but it must have been stored efficiently in my memory because much of it came back to me later and seemed to fit into the body of knowledge that I had built up by that time.
I began reading newspapers at an early age. I started with the comics. As my reading ability improved, my interest then expanded to the sports pages when I was nine or ten years old and then to the news and editorial sections when I reached my early teens. To this very day, I examine a newspaper in that same sequence; comics, sports, and then news and editorials.
I’m not sure that you are aware of it, but most American newspaper and TV news sources are quite unreliable and biased these days. So now what I’m really doing when I read a newspaper or watch news on TV is examining the news to determine how its content compares with what I get from my present sources on the Internet. I find that much of what I consider to be important news on the Internet is rarely mentioned in either our papers or on TV, and, if it is, it is usually many days after I’ve read it on the Internet.
Therefore, what I’d advise you to do if you decide that you want to become better informed is to begin to use the Internet as a news source. This means that your job will be more difficult than mine was because, as I have noted, when I was your age I could get reliable current news from both papers and later from TV. Now, we have to use other sources and some aren’t useful because they are not really news sources or because they are biased.
A few sources of news on the Internet that I recommend are: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info
From these sites, you can link also to resources all over the world. Bear in mind that while becoming informed is a requirement of voting intelligently, there are sources of biased as well as unbiased information on the Internet. In your early information seeking journey you must try not to fall prey to websites that come at you as highly biased blogs [web logs] that exist solely for the purpose of presenting the viewpoints of the owners of the blog. Some of those are good and some aren’t, but essentially they all usually are expressing the viewpoints of the writers or owners and, while interesting, aren’t what you should be seeking at this time . . . the news.
Try this. Take the situation in Iraq as an example. Read your daily local paper for everything you can find about the war Iraq, then go to the website links I have given above and read what the articles they present have to say is going on in Iraq. Do this exercise every day for a week. Do the same for different topics such as articles about the President, Vice-President and Secretary of Defense, always comparing what you read in your local paper with what you read on the sources I have given you.
I think that exercise, if you do it carefully and conscientiously, will be a start toward your thinking for yourself. Later, after you get a feel for what you are doing, and, perhaps, have started to have a view of what is going on in the world in terms of what your paper says and what the rest of the world is saying about world events, you can then start expanding your searches, looking at how other people think about the same topics. My basic advice as you start out on this journey is to stick with news, not opinion, articles. Thus, for example, if your paper quotes the President as saying that things are going well in Iraq and news sources on the Internet indicate that things aren’t going as well in Iraq as the President says, you have a starting point from which to start thinking about why the two sources of information differ.
A second thing that I had going for me that I don’t think you have today is that I was exposed for many years to the radio commentary of both Edward R. Murrow and Eric Severeid. Theirs was journalism at its best and I owe a great deal to those two for whatever ability I have to be able to express ideas succinctly and clearly. They were my role models early on insofar as news reporting was concerned. You can visit the following website which contains radio reports from Murrow during World War 2.
http://www.otr.com/murrow.shtml -
A good exercise for you is to go to Google on the Internet and simply enter the names of Murrow, Severeid and Walter Cronkite and get hundreds of references, most of which will help you learn, by listening and reading, how those reporters did more than simply read other people’s summaries of news to a listening audience. Those folks were able to digest what was going on in the world, summarize it, analyze it and comment on it reasonably and quite objectively.
The third major factor in my development was being born during the administration of Franklin Roosevelt. Obviously, I had no control over that.
But having lived through the Great Depression of the early 1930’s [you will have to research this on your own, I’ll not discuss it here] in my formative years and having experienced some of its effects on both my family and the community in which we lived, I was able to slowly form on my own an understanding of what Roosevelt was doing and had done for the country. He was able to take a country that was down and out, really down and out, in 1932, and through a series of acts and programs and great leadership bring it the long, slow way back to become the great community that was able to rise up, work together, and mobilize all of our resources for World War II in an extraordinarily short time. To me, that experience was probably the most exhilarating time of my life, that is, being able to actually experience the coming together of nearly all of the people of the country uniting for a common purpose. Nothing has come close to that in my lifetime, including, I must add, the country’s response to 9/11 in 2001. [I assume you know what I refer to by “9/11;” if not, Google it.]
Despite his wide popularity at the time, Roosevelt nevertheless had detractors. Primarily, they were of the Republican political persuasion and objected to what others considered to be FDR’s greatest strength; his vision that everyone, acting together for the common good, could build a greater democracy. It was this vision and the way Roosevelt implemented it that enabled America to unite in an unprecedented and successful war effort. The Republicans tended to put much more emphasis on the individual and the role of business and the “profit motive” [Google “profit motive”] in rewarding individual enterprise, not always operating for the common good of all of the people.
Bear in mind that Roosevelt wasn’t perfect; no one is. For example, internment of Japanese people, many of whom were American citizens, into “war relocation camps” during World War II was ill-advised and an act of racial prejudice that cast a shadow on his reputation. [Google “Japanese Internment World War II” to broaden your knowledge.] But it was his clear sense of mission and of people working for the common good of all that got Europe and the United States through World War II.
The complexities of mobilizing the industries of the U.S. for participation in World War II are discussed in detail in Eisenhower’s book Crusade in Europe. [You can find it at your town library. It wouldn’t hurt to read it before you go to the polls in November.]
You may be aware that some in the George W. Bush administration have likened their pursuit of the war in Iraq to Roosevelt’s mobilization for World War II. That is sheer nonsense. Space does not permit me going deeply into that comparison here, but trust me guys; I’ve experienced both situations and there is absolutely no comparison. Just consider that in the Iraq war huge companies favored by President Bush and Vice-President Cheney have made fortunes in Iraq by being granted no-bid contracts [Google “no bid contracts] to perform many services such as feeding the troops, transporting gasoline, rebuilding hospitals etc. Not only that, but these companies have incurred huge cost overruns [Google “cost overruns”] and on top of that have done shoddy work for which many of them have over-billed the government.
On the other hand, at the beginning of World War II, President Roosevelt in his first radio address following the outbreak of World War II, declared that "no American has the moral right to profiteer at the expense either of his fellow-citizens or of the men, women and children who are living and dying in the midst of war in Europe."
To hear a recording of the President’s 15 th Fireside Address in which he made the above statement and to get a clear picture of Franklin Roosevelt at his finest, click on the link below. [This time, select Fireside Speech #15.] By listening to this speech, you may get a sense of why I was so strongly influenced by this person. Sadly, in my judgment, you have not had the opportunity to be exposed to presidential greatness in your lifetimes. I hope you will pursue listening to all of Roosevelt’s speeches in order to get the full “flavor” of what my political “childhood” was like.
http://millercenter.virginia.edu/scripps/diglibrary/
prezspeeches/roosevelt/
The fourth factor that had a great influence on my becoming a responsible adult was William C. Hill. Dr. Hill was Principal of Classical High School in Springfield, Massachusetts, which I attended for four years.
Dr. Hill was an imposing man. I remember him as being over six feet tall with white hair and a ruddy, round face and wire-rimmed glasses.. He always wore a dark suit and a vest that always, if I remember correctly, had a gold watch chain running across it from pocket to pocket. I’m not sure what you would think of him now, but to us he gave the impression of strength and confidence.
When you entered Classical High, you came into a rather large corridor from which you could go left or right to classrooms or up stairs to more classrooms. Straight ahead of you was the auditorium where assemblies were held at least weekly. Over the entry doors to the auditorium a legend was printed in rather large letters: NO ONE HAS THE RIGHT TO DO THAT WHICH IF EVERYONE DID IT WOULD DESTROY SOCIETY.
At every assembly, after everyone was seated, Dr. Hill would come onto the stage from a side entrance and even before he came into view he would be shouting in a booming voice “No one has the right to do that which if everyone did it would destroy society.”
That phrase is taken from the writings of the philosopher Immanuel Kant [Google Immanuel Kant] and is known as a “Categorical Imperative” [Google “Categorical Imperative”] It may sound rather weird to you, but what it did was help make rather “dorky” kids into good citizens, people concerned about the effects of their own actions on other people.
Somehow, I don’t think that the Presidents Bush or President Clinton went to Classical High School.
I want you to know that after four years at Classical High, I don’t think many students had any trouble understanding what was meant by “that which if everyone did it.” I’ve spoken to many people who were at Classical with William Hill and most had retained the message.
Do you get it?
What we absorbed was four years of one man telling us over and over again that we had to understand and do well by our fellow human beings. That we had to rise above thinking in terms of race, religion, how a person looks, how much money a person has, what they wear, how they speak. That we have to try to understand people who are different from ourselves, who come from other cultures and try to see why they feel the way they do, if they differ with us. That we have to try to understand cultural differences, different ways other nationalities deal with similar problems. That we have to understand that when problems arise, we have to use our brains, not our brawn. That we have to understand that we are the representatives of democracy, representatives of an idea, for democracy is nothing but an idea, that in order to survive, society (that is, the collection of all the peoples of the world) has to operate according to what is fair and true and decent. That we do not have the right to do those things which if everyone did them would destroy society, that is, the collective ability of human beings to live together.- in peace and harmony with all sharing in the benefits of doing that.
Now, you can consider the above words as just a bunch of meaningless nonsense coming from an ancient idealist or you can consider them as something possibly to hang your future on.
You can go into the voting booth in November as an “air head” and vote according to how your parents would vote or your uncle Charlie would vote or your brother or sister who is a soldier in Iraq would vote, or you can prepare yourself ahead of time by consulting some of the resources I’ve suggested above and becoming your own person, assuming the responsibility for your own actions based on the best your brain can do.
Examine your own values in terms of “that which if everyone did it.” If everyone thought and acted like you do to everyone else, would it destroy society? How important is it to you to live in a Democratic society? How important is it to you to have a healthy family with good medical coverage, good jobs, good housing, a clean environment, equal opportunities for education, good schools and good teachers? See how the candidates that you will have to choose between stack up with respect to those things. Above all, try to understand that it is only by people working for the common benefit of all of the people that ideas like democracy can succeed. It cannot succeed if every group decides that what it wants is its only or main concern.
Most of the information you need is not going to come to you; you have to seek it. How you, all of you, then put it all together will determine our country’s future.
We get what we vote for. The people voted for George W. Bush twice and you have to determine before you vote in November if what he has done is what you want for yourself and your country, for your parents, your relatives, your future children and grandchildren. If you have followed my suggestions above, you will have heard Mr. Roosevelt express his ideas about democracy. Mr. Bush is not running for office in November but members of congress who represent his position are. Bush’s six years in office represent what he and his supporters stand for.
You have a huge responsibility. You have to decide which of the two ideas for running a democracy, Roosevelt’s or Bush’s is best. By voting for Democrat candidates, you vote for the party that stands for the common good. By voting for a Republican candidate, you vote for more of what Mr. Bush has done in the past six years. If you’ve done the homework I’ve suggested above, the choice should be obvious to you. Don’t take your responsibility lightly. You must make up your own minds. Your future depends on it.
