The wisdom of ages

I was driving home today and happen to catch this excerpt of a speech on the radio. Read it and guess by whom and when it was written.

Entangled abroad and embattled at home, America searches for answers, not just to specific programs, but to the great question, What do we stand for? Where do we want to go? Do we stand for our wealth? Is that what is important about America? Is that what is significant about the United States? Asked better perhaps, are we really so wealthy?

Half a million American children suffer from serious malnutrition, and I have seen of them, some of them, I have seen personally some of them starving in the state of Mississippi, their stomachs bloated, their bones and their bodies scarred, many of them retarded for life. Up to 80 percent of some Indian tribes are unemployed. And the suicide rate among the high school children is shockingly high, dozens of times the national average. For the black American of the urban ghetto, we really do not know what its unemployment rate is, because from one-fifth to one-third of these adult men in these areas have literally dropped out from sight, uncounted and unknown by all of the agencies of government, drifting about the cities, without hope and without family and without a future. By these standards, we are not so rich a country. Truly we have a great gross national product, almost 800 billion dollars, but can that be the criterion by which we judge this country? Is it enough? For the 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 jails for the people who break them. It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife and television programs, which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. And the gross national product, the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, the joy of their play. It is indifferent to the decency of our factories and the safety of our streets alike. 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 wit nor courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our duty 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 to be Americans. Is it then that, is it then our wealth or is it our military power that we stand for in the United States?

Beyond our borders, we have become the greatest force in the world. Some have even spoken of us as the new imperial power. Even if we should desire such a role, it is no longer possible, as the history of the last 20 years has so unmistakably shown. The day has passed when a country can successfully rule distant lands by force. The issue for us is whether we will live as an island in the midst of a hostile world community or whether we will be joined with other independent nations in search of common goals. We must understand this, because so much depends on what is going to happen in the future as to whether this concept is clear to us. Other countries will associate themselves with us, not because they will be forced to, but because they find in our acts and in our policies a common interest and an understanding of their own ideals and their own aspirations; an understanding of the values that they can respect and admire; an understanding of the values that they can strive to emulate; thus consideration of our wealth and our power brings us full circle to the question with which we began: What do we stand for? Nor should we be surprised, for this is the most powerful and constant lesson of all of history.

The wars and the conquests, the politics and the intrigues of state are soon covered by the years. The triumph of Athens, the empire of Rome, the march of armies, the names of governors - all these did leave some imprint, but it is the ideas and the statutes, the plays of Sophocles and the philosophy of Plato that endure most vividly shaping and enriching our lives to this very day. The mastery of transient events, our accomplishments, our victories will ultimately matter far less than what we contribute - all of us - in this country to the liberation of the human spirit. That is what we have always stood for in the past, that it is what we must stand for at the moment. That is what has given us our unique position, our unprecedented strength. That is why, in fact, we are proud to be Americans.

For two hundred years, America has meant a vision of national independence and personal freedom and justice between men. But whether it will continue to mean this will depend on the answers to difficult and complex problems. It will depend on whether we sit content in our storehouses, dieting while others starve, buying eight million new cars a year while most of the world goes without shoes. It will depend on whether we act against crime and its causes and wipe the stain of violence from this land. It will depend on whether we can halt and can reverse the tide of ever greater centralization in Washington and return the power to the American people in their local communities. It will depend on whether we can turn the private genius of industry to the service of great public ends, using comprehensive tax incentives to help industry create the jobs, train the workers and build the housing, which all of the efforts of the federal government have, so far, failed to do. It will depend on whether we still hold, as the framers proclaimed, a decent respect for the opinions of mankind, or whether we will act as if no other nations existed, flaunting our power and flaunting our wealth against the judgment and desires of neutrals and allies alike.

It will depend on whether men still believe, as de Gaulle said at the height of the Cuban missile crisis, that this great nation, the United States, does not act in small ways. But whether like Athens of old, we forfeit sympathy and support alike-and ultimately our own security-in the single-minded of pursuit of our own goals and our own purposes. These are the questions to debate in this election year. This is the true agenda, which faces not just the contenders for office but all of the American people. This is what we must really examine in this election year; to meet and master these challenges will take great vision and will take great persistence. But that seems to me to be the responsibility of the great political parties of this country. To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln just 100 years ago, we must know where we are and whether we are going before determining how to get there.

In this, the most dangerous and yet the most challenging period in our history, this is what is so desperately needed [...] But the larger question of whether we have advanced our civilization and the cause of freedom will depend on our own morality and our philosophy and our commitment to our ideals and to our principles. These precepts must guide us again as the great debate begins or if we do have the will, the vision, and the courage to create and to hold fast, to be shaping ideals which men follow, not from the enslavement of their bodies, but from the compulsions of their own hearts. If we do this, then we know that men will stand with us at home and abroad among our friends and even in the camp of our adversaries. For it is the shaping impulse of America that neither fate nor nature nor the irresistible tides of history, but the work of our own hands matched to reason and principle that will determine our destiny. This is the pride, this is the pride and even the arrogance of America, but it's the experience and it is the truth. And, in any case, it is the only way that we can live. I thank you.

And the answer is... Robert F Kennedy addressing the Commonwealth Club in 1968. The rest of the speech in full is in their archives.

The economists among you might have guessed the date from the figure given as the GNP of the country - its now around ten trillion dollars. Maybe there aren't quite as many suffering from malnutrition with bloated stomachs in Mississippi these days, but even today 20% (over half a million) of its inhabitants are living in poverty, much more than the 12.4% national average. Those historical spoilers aside, the rest of the descriptions of the USA seem to me to be bang on for October 2004.

I ask myself, has America really made so little progress in the last 36 years? Could a description of the state of the nation, now so hotly debated in recent time really still be so apt? That's a period spanning almost my entire lifetime and the USA doesn't seem to have learned or achieved a thing, and the same age old question remain before us and promote the same tired responses from those in power.

Maybe between 1968 and now the USA has earned and squandered a fortune, if it did I must have missed it. Or perhaps since then we have been witnessing some of the last spasmodic blasts of the once great American empire. Like a party ballon careening around a room with a rude exhalation of its last energies perhaps it will soon be over. Maybe then, when the wealth is gone like a late frost facing morning in America, will we truly learn the answer to the questions "What do we stand for?" and "Where do we want to go?"