The Wisdom Deficit

by Steve Barrera

Could that reason be...Principles Betrayed? When the President appeared on Al-Jazeera Television to apologize for the mistreatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, he revealed that he knows he has gambled not America’s blood, nor her treasure, so much as her very promise to the world to be the beacon of hope for liberty and justice for all. If we lose that, we become the angry monster that our enemies wish to make of us.

The stakes could not be higher. But our vision is clouded and confused. The light of wisdom is not shining, revealing as it should the justness of the American cause and the worthiness of her enterprise. And that is why Mr. Bush has completely lost so much of the electorate. That is why so many Americans seem to fear, rather than love, their own nation.

But where is Mr. Kerry with his torch? He appears to be wandering without one in the wilderness – not exactly a man one can follow, since he has nowhere to go. And so, instead of visionaries providing the guidance we need to stay - or to correct - our course, we have two grown men of sixty years arguing like schoolchildren over “false pretenses” and “flip-flops.” The latest Kerry campaign message turns the tables to accuse Bush of “flip-flopping” – Mr. Kerry is made of rubber, not of glue, don't you see.

It is this wisdom deficit which produces the emotionalism in today’s partisan politics. Each side is deeply suspicious of the other, and blind to their concerns. Each childish attack by one reinforces the other’s commitment to its narrow point of view. Each side’s failure to articulate its vision allows the other to see shadowy conspiracies where none exist – perhaps Bush is just a puppet of a sinister cabal of neocons and Halliburton executives; perhaps Kerry is just a sacrifice the Democrats have tossed into the Republican shark-tank while they plot their return to power via the ChiComs.

But the worst casualty of this mind-rotting disease is our nationalism. The great fear of those who refuse to wave the American flag is that that symbol has been hijacked for an unjust cause. And the great danger created by those Americans who insist on portraying their nation as history’s villain is that they will corrode our morale to the point that we really do shrug off our principles and decide, since we’re hated worldwide, that we might as well just bomb at will.

It is up to our leaders to provide the guiding light by which all Americans – liberal and conservative, metro and retro, blue zone and red zone – can find hope for the future. But instead our candidates for President gripe and sneer like petulant children, hurling pathetic invectives and embarrassing us all before the world. That is their true dereliction of duty, and the true measure of their unfitness for command.

Please, Boomer generation, wake up to your responsibility in our rendezvous with destiny in this astounding and transformative New Age. We cannot afford to be so dangerously divided, with such a great responsibility as the future of the Middle East in our hands. We must find a way to restore pride in a nation in which all Americans can believe. We owe it to ourselves, and to humanity.

© Steve Barrera and Generation Watch 2004-2007. All rights reserved.