Saratoga News Point of View Carl Heintze Our world has become worse than imperfect We live in an imperfect world. Pipes leak, nails bend, movies and airplanes don't start on time, not all stocks make a profit. The imperfections can be expected in things mechanical. It would be nice if they didn't also exist in humans, too. But they do. These days it seems the human world is more imperfect than that in which machines fail to perform. We've got a president with deep moral flaws who's unable or unwilling to tell the truth, a Congress that is scared to death to act on anything for fear of being diselected and so partisan it is unable to agree on anything. We have a governor who wants to run for president without the vision to govern the most populous state in the nation. We have an initiative system which makes possible at least half a dozen meaningless but expensive propositions on each election ballot, a media which seems content with sensation and not responsibility, an electorate which is so disgusted with all this that it refuses to go to the polls at all, thereby abdicating its responsibility for what's going on. Who needs it? Imperfection is one thing. Disarray and disorder is another. How did this come about? We can't even agree on that. But here's my theory for whatever it is worth, probably not much. Bill Clinton--and a lot of other baby boomers--grew to adulthood during the Vietnam War. Vietnam tested us as a nation in a way that has not happened in our history before. Some, eventually most of us, came to believe it was wrong. But some also believed in it, in patriotism carried to its ultimate degree, sacrifice on the field of battle. For those who believed otherwise, apparently like Bill C., and other baby boomers who did not serve, the world came to have two sets of morality, one personal, the other national. The personal morality was what one really believed, the national morality was the creed, flawed and defiant of authority that was personified in protests, flag burnings, destruction of draft cards, draft evasion by whatever means possible and exhibitions of rage. For rage was the only expression possible for a generation caught between two opposing points of view. In the end, rage prevailed, and we abandoned the unbridled certainty that we were the greatest nation on earth. Along the way the truth got shaded or even ignored. "I didn't inhale," as the president said. At the same time, a defeat fed the paranoia of "enemies" somewhere out there threatening to destroy the Republic, the world or at least the president. For the rage had done its ultimate damage: it made us abandon the war, but not until after Cambodia, and it destroyed President Lyndon Johnson. And the nation succumbed to an uncertainty from which it has yet to recover. I write none of this in defense of a philandering president, but only to underline the sad truth that when one lives by one morality while paying lip service to another, the way to hell is paved with good intentions. Whether President Clinton was seduced or whether he was the seducer seems immaterial. What is material is that he was listening only to his voice, adhering only to his personal morality, a morality which we should not share. That we do is distressing. For a generation of baby boomers there often seem two standards by which to live. One is corporate, the other is individual. It's the latter which allows for greed in the work place, for screwing the other guy to get ahead, for playing the game to win regardless of the consequences. In this game, power is the attribute that counts, not pity, not understanding, not kindness nor concern. Nor do I exempt my own generation, the one that give birth to the boomers. We believed too easily in a world divided between light and darkness, in a single morality which because we had won the Big War was the one which was to be imposed on the rest of the world. It was a belief reinforced by the presence out there somewhere of "the East," "Communism," "Russian expansion," the way we saw the rest of the evil in the world which we could not control. To combat this it often seemed anything was permissible. Our Cold War history was based on the premise that anything was useful and correct in fighting this menace. When defending ourselves against the rest of the world there was no morality. Anything was permissible. From this freedom of license we got Irangate, Star Wars and the right to interfere in the political and individual lives of nations smaller and less powerful than ourselves. And now we are paying the price. We are wandering in disillusionment and frustration, prisoners of ourselves. How long will it take us to admit our individual responsiblity? To find our own personal responsibility? To seek outside ourselves for a morality both honest and humble, useful and caring, truthful and worth living? [ Back to Contents Page | Saratoga News Home Page | Archives ] This article appeared in the Saratoga News, October 21, 1998. ©1998 Metro Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved.