Words of wisdom from a self-proclaimed “humanist” and “liberal”, a well known author who traveled the world over and lived in many countries, while writing some of the most well known and widely read books of the 20th century – A man who lived frugally and whose philanthropy is said to have exceeded $100 million.
No one that I have read ever said it any better!
Excerpt from The World Is My Home, by James Michener – Random House – 1992
Chapter — “Politics” – Page 227
“As I approached the age of eighty-two I was confronted by the savage rejection of everything decent I had ever stood for. In the 1988 election President Reagan announced that anyone who is liberal-he used the phrase ‘the L word,’ as if it were fatally contaminated-was outside the mainstream of American life and intimated that the liberal’s patriotism was suspect. Vice President George Bush went a lot further by shouting that anyone who did not wish to recite the Pledge of Allegiance was probably false to the honored traditions of our nation, while Senator Quayle declared: ‘Michael Dukakis is a member of the America Civil Liberties Union, but George Bush is a member of the National Rifle Association,’ as if that made the former a loathsome traitor and the latter a great patriot. I found all this denigration of liberals personally offensive.
As I was being ejected from the mainstream of American life, I stumbled into a situation that forced me to evaluate all aspects of my political life. I was living in Florida so as to be near the Caribbean Sea, about which I was doing extensive research. Because I wanted to catch the flavor of the area, I not only read newspapers and watched television but also listened for the first time in my life to what was accurately termed ‘talk radio,’ keeping my set tuned permanently to Station WNQS, which provided a running report on the topics that really concerned the local citizens. What I learned from listening was invaluable.
Tuesday and Wednesday nights were assigned to a soft-spoken, congenial, well-informed man named Norman Neem in Juno Beach. He conducted a call-in show that became a must for me, because in it he abused, vilified and scorned every noble cause to which I had devoted my entire life. It seemed to me that he was against any law sought to improve the lot of the poor, any tax that endeavored to improve the quality of our national life, any act in Congress that hoped to better the condition of the nation as a whole, any movement that tried to lessen police brutality, any bill that struggled to maintain a fair balance between the contending forces in our society and any move to improve education, protect public health, or strengthen the supervision of agencies running wild.
His scorn for all Democratic politicians was boundless, with Kennedy, McGovern, Carter, Mondale and Dukakis bearing the brunt of his vilification week after week. It seemed that he saw nothing wrong with Nixon, Ford, Bush or Quayle, while his admiration for Reagan verged on the worshipful. I could never quite determine what kind of government he was for, but at various intervals I guessed that what he really wanted was some version of either Robert Welch’s United States or Lyndon LaRouche’s. It also seemed that if he had his way blacks, women, children and the poor would suffer even worse constraints than they do at present, and the millionaires, tycoons, big businessmen and generals would prosper as never before. Every man in our public life whom I distrusted 1 heard him enshrine as a hero; and every cause for which I worked he denigrated with a scorn that was brilliant.
It was extremely fortunate that I had come upon Neem, because he possessed such a strong native intelligence that he made his positions almost palatable; sometimes after I heard him sign off on midweek nights I started my evening walk with considerable fear: God, I hope no one who listens to his show and agrees with him knows I’m liberal, because if he did he could shoot me.
Neem’s weekly diatribes were the best thing that happened to me in Florida, for they made me stop, take a long hard look at myself, and determine where I might possibly have gone wrong. As I engaged in this introspection, I learned one valuable trick: ‘Listen carefully to Neem. Identify exactly what he is saying. And them adopt a position one hundred and eighty degrees in the opposite direction, as far from him as you can get, and you’ll be on the right track.’ This simple rule forced me to define my beliefs and renew my opposition to all things I intuitively detested; had he been a lamebrain or a mere ranter I could have dismissed him, but because he was so able at marshaling of facts, street rumors and inherited positions, such as reverence for the Pledge of Allegiance and maniacal hatred of the A.C.L.U., I had to clarify my own thinking, and thus confirmed who I was and what I believed.
I decided that I was both a humanist and a liberal, each of the most dangerous and vilified type, and so I shall be increasingly until I die.
I am a humanist because I think humanity can, with constant moral guidance, create reasonably decent societies. I think that young people who want to understand the world can profit from studying the works of Plato and Socrates, the behavior of the three Thomases-Aquinas, More and Jefferson-the austere analyses of Emmanuel Kant and the political leadership of Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt. I like the educational theories of John Dewey and the pragmatism of William James. I am terrified of restrictive religious doctrine, having learned through history that when men who adhere to any form of it are in control, common men like me are in peril. I do not believe that pure reason can solve the perpetual problems unless it is modified by poetry and art and social vision. In the later decades of my life I learned to be suspicious of those well- meaning men who were noisy liberals or even Communists in their youths, only to become hard-edged and even savage right-wingers in their maturity, trampling upon the very flags under which they had once marched so proudly. I find such men abhorrent, never to be trusted; I do not wish to associate with those among my acquaintances who have taken that craven course because they are turncoats who will once again become liberals when the bankruptcy of their present allegiances becomes evident.
I am, in other words, a humanist, and if you want to charge me with being the most virulent kind, a secular humanist, I accept the accusation, but I do not want to be accused of atheism. No one who loves Deuteronomy and that first chapter of James can be totally antireligious.
A charge that can be lodged against me is that I am a knee-jerk liberal, for I confess to that sin. When I find that a widow has been left penniless and alone with three children, my knee jerks. When I learn that funds for a library have been diminished almost to the vanishing point, my knee jerks. When I find that a playground for children is being closed while a bowling alley for grown men is being opened, my knee jerks. When men of ill intent cut back on teachers’ salaries and lunches for children, my knee jerks. When the free flow of ideas is restricted, when health services are denied whole segments of the population, when universities double their fees, my knee jerks, and when I learn that all the universities in Texas combined graduated two future teachers qualified to teach calculus but more than five hundred trained to coach football, my knee jerks, and I hope to grow so old and indifferent that I can listen to wrong and immoral choices being made without my knee flashing a warning.
Why does it jerk? To alert me that I have been passive and inattentive too long, to remind me that one of the noblest purposes for which human beings are put on earth is to strive to make their societies better, and to see that gross inequities are not perpetuated. And to halt them requires effort and financial contributions, usually in the form of taxes. The best expenditure of money I have made in my life has not been for what made me either happier or more comfortable, but for the taxes I have paid to the various governments under which I have lived. In general, governments have spent their shares of my money more wisely and with better results than I have spent my own funds, and one aspect of my life about which I am most ashamed is that I spent most of a decade living in three states that had no state income tax-Texas, Florida, Alaska-and the deficiencies that the first two suffered because of the lack were evident daily. I like states like New York, Massachusetts and California that do tax and try to spend their income wisely.
One of the sickest economic preachments has been ‘the trickle-down theory’: ‘If you allow the very rich to make as much money as they can without government restraint, they will magnanimously allow some of their largess to trickle down to the peasants below.’ Most advocates of the theory do not express it in those blunt terms, but I have found that that is what they mean. I am not for across-the-board redistribution of wealth, and I know that rich people invest their money in enterprises to create employment, and I can cite a dozen other constructive uses of great wealth; but I still believe that society prospers most when there are laws to bring that wealth back into circulation, when there are taxes to provide social service that otherwise might not be available, when there is governmental surveillance to ensure proper practices and prevent manipulation of financial markets, and when profits are plowed into research and the education of new generations.
When I have been dead ten years and a family comes to tend the flowers on the grave next to mine, and they talk about the latest pitiful inequity plaguing their town, they will hear a rattling from my grave and can properly say: ‘That’s Jim again. His knee is still jerking.”
Direct quotations from James Michener’s memoir — The World Is My Home