Me, I looked south toward the high-rise apartment building
on Broadway, near to where we had spent ten years of our life restoring a Victorian
cottage. I remembered talking by phone to an aged woman in Ohio, born there in
1898. She told me how her father’s boss, a Mr. Gans, had thrown a fit when he
learned they were building a house “out in the country” instead of “in town.” They were busy building our city then and still are.
My thoughts shifted to the words of John Ruskin: “When we build, let us think that we build forever. Let it
not be for present delight, nor for present use alone; let it be such work as
our descendants will thank us for, and let us think, as we lay stone on stone,
that a time is to come when those stones will be held sacred because our hands
have touched them, and that men will say as they look upon the labor and
wrought substance of them, See! this our fathers did for us."
Any thinking person, one who sat where we did that evening, would
have to marvel at the miracle that is a modern city. Just to wonder at the fact
that so many families rested out there safe in their homes with so many
conveniences of our modern world at hand. I thought of the myriad maze of pipes
and wires, both above and below ground, that allow those miracles. I thought
about the armies of dedicated public and private servants that maintain that world
of safety and convenience.
Oh, I know there are cynics who will point out the lapses of
safety and convenience. Tell that to the tribes that once lived on the savanna with the mammoths, vipers, and saber-tooted tigers. It’s not the cynics that
bemuse me. We’ve always had them. They may even serve an evolutionary need.
I read somewhere that there is a genetic mechanism within us that goes off when
we begin to feel too safe, warning us that danger still exists. It goes back to
that savanna wherein the most relaxed and unstressed was likely to be the next
eaten.
No, I don’t begrudge the cynics. It’s the misguided
who call themselves “libertarians” that amaze and trouble me. They stand in the majesty of
a great city or great nation and, somehow, delude themselves into thinking that
all this could exist if each individual were simply free to behave exactly as she
or he felt, at any given moment. They seem to believe that things would work
for the best if each of us did this without regard for
- accomplishments that, by their scope and size require the efforts of the entire village;
- systems, services, and structures for which individual
costs can’t be assigned;
- the needs of “the least of those among us;
- a public good that transcends politics;
- brilliant accomplishments by scientists that can’t be
effectuated without cooperation and assistance from the polis; or
- the unalterable cost of civilization.
They are not stupid or evil beings, these folks. They are
our brothers and sisters with whom we would agree on most things American. It
is we who have let them down by halting their education at the sophomore level.
It is we who have allowed education to become demonized by those who are stupid
and evil. It is we who elect politicians who promote nihilism. It is we who only
pontificate from a warm room on a full stomach and by words instead of actions
and examples. It is we who would cast a vote for The Dark One himself if he
only supported the one single issue upon which we are fixated.
Is it any wonder that the Galilean is so often depicted as
weeping?
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