This Noble Land (3 page)

It is the responsibility of a nation to provide employment for its young. The question of whether a nation enables its young to become producers and thus contributors to the nation’s wealth will be a major focus of this book.

8. Does the nation provide a financial/taxation system that helps keep the difference between the very rich and the very poor at an acceptable level, and does it encourage the development of a moderately well-to-do middle class of entrepreneurs?

I deem this to be one of the crucial responsibilities of a society and I am appalled at nations like Mexico that generate considerable wealth but refuse to distribute it up and down the economic ladder. The failure to develop a sturdy middle class is a sign of weakness, one that condemns a society to mediocrity at best and revolution at worst. I will elaborate later on my contention that the United States has grown sloppy in dealing with this problem of the distribution of wealth and must try to redress the imbalance.

9. Does the nation provide churches for the moral guidance of its people and especially its leaders?

I believe that a society requires moral values and a conviction to abide by them. History is replete with examples of strong-minded citizens who have acquired a solid moral foundation without the assistance of organized religion—churches or priests or rabbis—but it is risky for the nation as a whole to rely on the chance that its citizens will individually apply themselves to building a stable moral base without benefit of organized religion. It is better to enlist the churches in providing moral instruction, even indoctrination, for the vast majority of its young people. I have found that a man without strong moral principles is like a ship without a rudder; he cannot be depended upon to remain upright in a storm. I would never want to live in a community that did not have influential churches.

10. Does the society provide recreational opportunities?

In my studies of world cultures, I have been constantly impressed to see that each seminal culture sponsored athletic contests for the amusement of the public and for competition between states. It can be no accident that Greece and Rome had centers for competition, and that Saint Paul would refer several times to the athletic games of his new Christians. Historians repeatedly mention hippodromes for racing, arenas for boxing and other diversions, and fields for horsemanship. Vigorous athletic participation is as old as civilization and must therefore be fulfilling a basic need.

However, the nation cannot allow legitimate athletic competition to degenerate into brutal violence that glorifies the often destructive macho aspects of human nature. Unfortunately, in the United States the growing violence in sports has become part and parcel of a growing acceptance of violence as a normal factor in the life of our society. I shall discuss at length how this glorification of macho behavior in our society is damaging the traditions upon which we founded and built our nation.

11. Does the society provide access to museums, opera houses, symphony halls, theaters, parks and zoos?

At the same time that the ancients were promoting athletic competitions, they seem to have spent just as much of their resources on theaters for the presentation of plays, stages for mime and dance, and on structures adorned with majestic sculptures and fine paintings. I admire good athletic competition, but I love music, the theater, dance, sculpture and painting; they form the benchmark by which cultures are judged. Sports and the arts must be kept in balance.

While I grant that perhaps even a majority of citizens would express little interest in ‘cultural’ functions and would be loath to
support them, I believe they are essential to a good public life—they are not only for the pleasure of the upper classes or the cultural elite. Mankind’s more esoteric achievements should also be made available to underprivileged children, a random few of whom will develop an interest in art or in opera. As I did—that was my history; the availability of good libraries, art museums and great symphony halls meant that I could educate myself, regardless of whether or not I had instructors. This kind of self-education should be made possible for all young people, and if they ignore the opportunities it will be to their loss. The boy or girl who discovers the world’s intellectual treasures becomes open to endless adventures and self-improvement.

Cultural institutions should be supported with tax money, if possible. I am personally willing to help support my country’s cultural organizations through taxation because I have little regard for any society that refuses to assist such institutions financially. I told one group of city leaders who were debating whether they could afford a new stadium: ‘Any city is a collection of citizens who
behave
like a city. That means they are obligated to provide a stadium for sports, a theater for drama and dance and opera, an art museum, and a very strong chain of free libraries.’ That’s what cities are all about, and nations, too.

12. Is the nation able to balance the different cultural and ethnic and racial groups within its society, and does it treat all such groups equitably?

I believe that in the United States the deterioration of racial relations has become so intense that there is a risk of interracial strife unless the situation is drastically improved. No nation can allow its social, political or economic systems to discriminate against any one segment of its society. Neither can it allow minorities to become so frustrated that they feel it is futile to try to educate themselves or to raise their standards of living.

13. Does the nation provide an orderly system whereby the interests of the aged are protected from the ravages that overtake them?

I place a high priority on this social obligation primarily, I suppose, because I am myself subject to the demands and realize how delinquent we are as a society in caring for our older people. Compared with nations that have a superior social concern about the welfare of the aged—China, Japan, Denmark, Sweden, Korea and the smaller East Asian countries—we are far behind and ought to make a serious effort to catch up.

In my travels I have constantly applied these criteria to other countries as well as to my own, and found that differences between societies are glaring; not surprisingly, I have concluded that certain societies are more admirable than others. To deny this is to blind oneself to reality. At the end of six decades of persistent evaluation of nations I am prepared to present some conclusions as to how the United States compares with other nations.

Evaluations

A quick scan of the middle column above will explain why I feel justified in describing my homeland as a great society, especially during the decades of my growing up. Except for the racial discrimination that has been our national disgrace throughout our history, we excelled in so many important categories and reached respectable levels even in those where other nations surpassed us that I had a right to be proud.

As I now review the column I begin to wonder if my favorable evaluation of America was skewed by the intense indoctrination I received from my first day in Sunday school and, more important, my first morning in public school. For the first six or seven years of my education I lapped up patriotism until I acquired a faith in my country that has never since diminished. It continues to dictate my behavior at unexpected times and provides me with an almost automatic set of responses when public values are being challenged. I am not wise enough to determine whether that early and incessant indoctrination made me too uncritical.

But a study of the third column proves that today I am able to see American society with a more critical eye. I stand by every evaluation in that column and might make some of the judgments even harsher.

What the plethora of negative evaluations in the summary suggests is that our society is in danger, and, in some cases like the failure of large parts of our educational system, even in peril. The magnitude of these fracture points and what can be done to anticipate and escape them will be the focus of the remaining chapters in this essay.

I
have been privileged to know American families at almost every level of income, from the Texas oil billionaires, about whom I have written, to the numerous garden-variety rich families with not much over a million. A large proportion of the families with which I have worked fall into the huge middle class with salaries around $75,000, and because I work with students I know scores who live on less than $10,000 a year. In the years prior to World War II the highest salary I ever had was $4,800 a year, so that a salary of $75,000 was far beyond the limits of my imagination, but of course $4,800 in the thirties was worth many times more than it is worth today. I have also been keenly interested in the street people so common in our cities who have minimal income and often no place to call home. They are outcasts, and I have never understood how they could have reached that appalling level. I cannot comprehend how a healthy man in his forties can have wasted his life and ended in the gutter, but even more incomprehensible is how a mother with two children could land beside him.

From a study of people with various levels of income I have come to realize just how important a living wage is. Fundamental to every problem I discuss in this book is not only our nation’s wealth but how it is distributed among the citizens.

So that we can have figures to refer to in our discussion, I present two different charts: the first listing outstanding family accumulations
of wealth sometimes dating back to the last century; the second showing yearly incomes of a random selection of people living today.

For
Forbes
magazine in 1994, $350 million marked the cutoff point between the very wealthy on the one hand and the merely elite who are categorized as ‘the comfortable millionaires.’ The ‘moderately wealthy’ trail behind in their $100 million ghettos.

In April 1995
The New York Times
reported that Federal Reserve figures from 1989, which the paper said were the most recent numbers available, revealed that ‘the wealthiest 1% of American households—with net worth of at least $2.3 million each—[owned] nearly 40% of the nation’s wealth.… Farther down the scale, the top 20% of Americans—households worth $180,000 or more—[possess] more than 80% of the country’s wealth.’ A year later, in April 1996,
The Wall Street Journal
reported that an analysis by the New York compensation consultants Pearl Meyer & Partners Inc. done for the newspaper showed that ‘the heads of about 30 major companies received compensation that was 212 times higher than the pay of the average American employee.’

Here is a list of some of the country’s wealthiest families:

Family Fortunes Accumulated in the Past but Still Intact (a sampling)