Samuel Johnson, a Tory, said you could judge a nation by the way it treated its poor, and Martin Luther King Jr. said — more than a half-century ago — that there was no excuse for poverty in a country as wealthy as the United States, so perhaps, in light of the generous pandemic aid bill passed this week, legislation designed to lighten burdens somewhat, the United States of America can be said at last to have seen the light.
We read about all these black holes in space through which no light escapes, but it almost seems at times that societies can mirror the process, that they can collapse upon themselves, their spirit sucked out of them.
A man sympathetic to those who not long ago stormed the Capitol was reported in The Times this week as saying it was everyone for himself these days, that people are casting about, merely wanting to be entertained, and that the age of chivalry had passed — thoughts I found interesting, though not as a justification for the mayhem that took place in the nation’s capital on Jan. 6, nor for cashiering the Enlightenment ideas that our founders professed, ideas having to do with self-government, self-improvement, and, insofar as we are able, selflessness.
It is this balance between individualism and comity, between concern for ourselves and concern for others, this sense of fairness, in a word, that distinguishes America at its best, and the relief bill just passed speaks to that, to America at its best.
To say, as I believe the man to whom I referred did, that it’s now the people versus the politicians, is to acquiesce in the suicide of our representative democracy, to effectively give up on America’s experiment and to court the tyranny against which we rebelled in the first place.
The franchise, widely extended, even some day to the extent that all votes will be equal, I trust will save our collective soul.