Pondering a thousand years of darkness
America remains the last best hope for man on Earth. Will it act that way when called upon?
The Normandy American Cemetery, Normandy, France. Photo courtesy The Normandy American Cemetery.
There’s something about Memorial Day that makes me think of Ronald Reagan’s line, delivered in 1964 in support of Barry Goldwater’s ill-fated presidential campaign:
You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we will sentence them to take the first step into a thousand years of darkness. If we fail, at least let our children and our children’s children say of us we justified our brief moment here. We did all that could be done.
Reagan didn’t say those words on Memorial Day, but they have long been connected with the holiday in my mind. I think it’s probably because Reagan was talking about service and sacrifice for America - the last best hope - and Memorial Day honors those who have sacrificed the most.
One of the most memorable things I got to do when I was mayor of Bend, some 10 years ago now, was to speak at a Memorial Day event held at a memorial to war dead in a cemetery in town. There were veterans and lots of people - even an F-15 flyover. I wasn’t the headliner (Senator Ron Wyden spoke after me), and I had about five minutes to say whatever I wanted.
I used that time to talk, in part, about Reagan’s quote, the unique role of America in the course of human history, and the value of the ultimate sacrifice of those who’ve died in service to our country. I argued that America remained something - an idea, really - too precious and too rare in human history to let slip away.
Each Memorial Day since, I’ve thought about that Reagan quote. What is unique about America in the course of human history, why it’s the indispensable nation standing between humanity and darkness, is that it is a country created for the purpose of preserving the liberty of its people. That it did so and still does so imperfectly and with glaring and shameful omissions regarding who qualifies as people deserving of liberty dims but does not snuff out the supernova that America’s founding and its enduring existence has been for the world. Following millennia consisting almost exclusively of brutality and subjugation of the governed at the hand of those who govern, the idea of America was revolutionary. It still is.
As remarkable as the founding was the fact that the reward for the sacrifice of those Americans we honor today has been so widely shared throughout humanity. Nations that killed hundreds of thousands of Americans, Germany and Japan, were, post-vanquishing, not turned into colonies but instead left to embark on liberal self-governance for the first time in their histories. The one-time subjects of our enemies, western Europeans, South Koreans and notably the Chinese, were saved from continued subjugation and, also, left to self-governance. The graves of American young men litter the Earth in places that our country liberated and left free. This, like America’s very existence, is an historical anomaly of the best kind.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about one part of that Reagan quote more than any other: the part about sentencing our children to take the first step into a thousand years of darkness. NB: I’m a blast to hang out with. I suppose I think about that more now that I have kids.
I don’t think I’m alone in harboring this gnawing feeling that America is on a precipice, that one more wrong step or two or three and we will plunge toward those thousand years of darkness, dragging the rest of the world with us. Sometimes it feels like we are already plunging.
It’s not an election result, or even a series of election results, that give me that feeling. It’s the fact that Americans are ignorant of, or forget about, the gift we’ve been given, to live here, now. I include myself in that critique. There’s something about the good life - and Americans today have it better by almost any available measure than any human beings have ever had it - that makes a person feel entitled. It can lead a person, say, this person, to grumble about business closures that don’t work and self-defeating economic policies and other things that are relatively picayune, compared to the big picture. And the big picture is that what we have, what we’ve been given, isn’t just special or rare; it’s unique.
When Americans are once again called upon to protect it, or to protect those who stand with it, will we answer the call? China, one of those nations we helped to save from Axis domination, is ascendant, expansionary and genocidal. Twentieth Century history demonstrates this is a dangerous combination. A confrontation, military or otherwise, seems inevitable. Maybe it’s not China but it will, someday, be some country that threatens the American idea. The period since World War II without major power wars is an historical aberration. It will not last forever.
America retains the wealth and technology to engage in a major power war and win it, but does it have the will? Is a country putatively rotten to the core with systemic racism and all manner of inequity worth fighting and dying for? Can a country that’s still arguing about who won the last presidential election summon the collective energy to stand up to bad guys? Do we even know bad guys when we see them anymore?
These are questions to which we can’t and won’t know the answer until a conflict or a potential conflict arises. When China attacks Taiwan. When Belarus, with Russian support, highjacks an American airliner, filled with Americans. When an Iranian missile strikes a U.S. warship. How far can our enemies push, how much can they damage our allies until America responds with force is very much an open question today.
In the past, the U.S. has used military force at times wisely and at times unwisely. But the historical net effect of American military might has been to stand between humanity and a thousand years of darkness. Our war dead, in their rendezvous with destiny, paid the highest sacrifice. Americans will be called upon once again to do the same. Our response will depend upon whether we still believe, whether we still know, we are the last best hope for man on Earth.
Jeff, this might surprise you but I voted for Reagan. I spoke out strongly against Bill Clinton not because his act was really criminal, I saw it as lowing the bar beneath the standard of the office. I would argue that ended up being true and has been lowered once again very recently. I was a Republican up to 2008 and I left when I saw the blurring of my religion with a political ideology. What scares me now is we can't even agree on facts. In fact, we can't even have civilized discussion or agree on sources of information. So much has gone into creating this situation, including ideological thinking that does not allow for compromise. There is no more I win when you win. It is only I win if I win. This isn't a football game of keeping score. In fact, those that do only exacerbate the problem. I have always been a fiscal conservative, and we can't even agree on that issue. It scares me how few have read more than the preamble, have never read about the arguments behind the articles of the constitution or the warnings that people like Alexis De Tocqueville pointed out. He stated that our democracy is dependent on a perpetual funding of an education in our founding. If we didn't, our democracy would fail. With how few can site anything more than one or two amendments to the constitution, and no articles of the constitution, I think his warning is coming true. He also warned of the danger of how we have placed so much importance over the individual we lose the perspective of the benefit of the society. We have created myths about our founding that it was formed by just a bunch of farmers when in fact it was really formed by a handful of some of the greatest minds at the time all well versed in Greek Philosophy and the Magna Carte, along with many other early writing on democracy. Today we think philosophy is a joke, yet the greatest discoveries in history did not come from science, it came from philosophy. My concern is the full tilt blaming of either the right or left. I have said for years, the far left and the far right are so extreme that both sides are bumping each other in the dark and they don't even know it. The Republicans like Mitt Romney, Jeff Flake, Adam Kinzinger, or Liz Cheney give me some hope of rational discourse in the future. As a veteran, son and brother of combat veterans, the value of my service is now viewed through the lens of my political affiliation! That is insanity. We made a war hero a joke with McCain, that was/is a disgrace. And we can't agree on that. I might not have agreed with McCain, but I understood the sacrifice he made. I don't know when my fellow Americans became the enemy, or that I am now seen that way, but its sad. I am reading a book now on the great depression. That is yet another piece of history we have forgotten and what the farmers of the midwest went through or how they were treated when they fled (hint: we saw them as foreigners and dirty immigrants that were lazy and dumb). We are sadly repeating history because we never taught its significance and the lessons that were learned. That is not the education systems fault, it is ours. When we realize when we point the finger at something there are three fingers pointing back at us, we may begin to realize its not "them" who created this problem. We did. When we individually stop contributing to this, we can fix it. Until then, get a flashlight because its going to get dark.
Any time anyone channels Reagan, they are hitting the target. We are in danger. I doubt we will react. But then we will revolt. Will freedom triumph over tyranny? It starts local. Bend went full on liberal with the new members on the school board. The darkness for some is already here. Redmond put conservatives in. When will other Americans see it? Will they ignore it? Probably. Less than 30% of the public in Central Oregon even bothered to vote. Thank you for the uplifting words. The struggle is real.