We need a “bigger" picture

The year now ending included elections. Many politicians, or the political party to which they belong, like to ask US “Are you better off now than you were four, or two, years, or even one year, ago? What’s usually missing from that question are such considerations as:

• Is your water supply polluted?
• Is the air you breathe clean?
• Is the rain that falls on you full of PFAS?
• Does your government listen to you?
• Are the officials you elect telling you the truth?
• Are there more species endangered now than a year or two ago?
• Has more money brought an improved quality of life?
• Are you and your family more or less stressed than you were a year or two ago?
• Do you have a future you can look forward to leaving for your children?

soon, a new year will dawn

Photo by J. Harrington

Many years ago, a politician I admired, Robert F. Kennedy, raised such issues in a 1968 speech. From what I can see, we’ve continued for more than fifty years to elect those who would prefer to ignore such questions. Maybe next year we can prepare oursellves to do better in 2024? That’s only a short portion of seven generations.

University of Kansas, March 18, 1968

Even if we act to erase material poverty, there is another greater task, it is to confront the poverty of satisfaction - purpose and dignity - that afflicts us all.  

Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things.  Our Gross National Product, now, is over $800 billion dollars a year, but that Gross National Product - if we judge the United States of America by that - that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage.  

It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them.  It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl.  

It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities.  It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children.  

Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play.  It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials.  

It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.  

And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.
     
If this is true here at home, so it is true elsewhere in world. 

The Road Not Taken

By Robert Frost

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

********************************************
Thanks for visiting. Come again when you can.
Please be kind to each other while you can.