This piece is about the State of the Union speech but not about politics per se. It’s an equal opportunity harangue applicable to neo-cons, left wing dems, tea baggers and populists alike.
I’m responding to what the cameras showed me as they scanned the faces of the pols, court justices (I almost wrote court jesters, an understandable subliminal slip considering the noble nine’s supreme descent from trusted adjudicates to sycophantic clowns), cabinet members, military brass (looking for all the world like caricatures of third world despots) and assorted mucky-mucks occupying both sides of the historic chamber’s aisles. I saw misanthropic old men, their frowns of negativism permanently etched into disdainful, mistrusting glares. On cue, in unison, they nodded agreement or deepened their grimaces into derisive scowls depending on “the side” they represented. I saw not a soupcon of genuine civility never mind a respect for the honored tradition of the speech and a benefit of the doubt afforded to the proposals tendered. It was “us” and “them” entrenched in unmovable cordons.
The observation saddened me. In school I was taught about a democracy that served the people, all the people from all levels of our society. But it was clear that these politicians not only represented narrow constituencies but tightly defined ideologies that claimed sole representation of the vastly broader tenets of democracy that birthed the country and gave it its strength. I saw our nation floundering in demagoguery; strangled by political party fundamentalism. I saw in those faces a political system that serves only the minority of the populace, the people who seek, and wield power.
What saddened me more, for the most part I was looking at the faces of men who were in their fifties and sixties and seventies. These were America’s senior citizens, the AgeWise demographic who by this time in their lives should have substituted compassion for contempt, tolerance for prejudice and a one-world, universality for isolation behind battlements of self-righteousness. I was disheartened. The example these men were setting would only breed more rancor and more stalemate and more of the now-precipitous decline in the majesty of our country. I wondered if these men, so contemptuous and petulant, were collectively the face of America’s senior citizens. I hope not. If we seniors want to be respected as patriarchs rather than pariahs, we have to start behaving as teachers rather than political terrorists.
