Bill Moyers: A Great But Broken Promise

[babylonsister]

http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2007/05/23/a_great_but_broken_promise.php

A Great But Broken Promise
Bill Moyers
May 23, 2007



Bill Moyers is chairman of the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy and an independent journalist with his own production company. This article is the commencement address Bill Moyers gave this year at Southern Methodist University.

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My young friends, you are not leaving here in ordinary times. The ancient Greeks had a word for a moment like this. They called it “kairos.” Euripedes describes kairos as the moment when “the one who seizes the helm of fate, forces fortune.” As I was coming here to Dallas today to ask what you are going to do to make the most of your life, I thought: Please God, let me be looking in the face of some young man or woman who is going to transcend the normal arc of life, who is going one day to break through, inspire us, challenge us, and call forth from us the greatness of spirit that in our best moments have fired the world’s imagination. You know the spirit of which I speak. Memorable ideas sprang from it: “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”…“created equal”… “government of, by, and for the people”…“the only thing we have to fear is fear itself”…“I have a dream.” Those were transformational epochs in American politics, brought forth by the founding patriots who won our independence, by Lincoln and his Lieutenants who saved the Union, by Franklin Roosevelt who saved capitalism and democracy, and by Martin Luther King, martyred in the struggle for equal rights. These moments would have been lost if left to transactional politics—the traditional politics of “You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.” But moral leadership transcended the realities at hand and changed the course of our history.

Never have we been more in need of transformational leadership.

America’s a great promise but it’s a broken promise.

It’s not right that we are entering the fifth year of a war started on a suspicion. Whatever your party or politics, my young friends, America can’t sustain a war begun under false pretenses because it is simply immoral to ask people to go on dying for the wrong reasons. We cannot win a war when our leaders don’t have the will or courage to ask everyone to sacrifice, and place the burden on a few hundred thousand Americans from the working class led by a relative handful of professional officers. As is often said—America’s not fighting the war; the American military is fighting the war, everyone else is at the mall. Our leaders are not even asking us to pay for it. They’re borrowing the money and passing the IOU’s to you and your kids.

America needs fixing. Our system of government is badly broken.

You are leaving here as our basic constitutional principles are under assault—the rule of law, an independent press, independent courts, the separation of church and state, and the social contract itself. I am sure you learned about the social contract here at SMU. It’s right there in the Constitution—in the Preamble: “We, the People”—that radical, magnificent, democratic, inspired and exhilarating idea that we are in this together, one for all and all for one.

I believe this to be the heart of democracy. I know it to be a profoundly religious truth. Over in East Texas where I grew up, my father’s greatest honor, as he saw it, was to serve as a deacon in the Central Baptist Church. In those days we Baptists were, in matters of faith, sovereign individualists: the priesthood of the believer, soul freedom, “Just you and me, Lord.” But time and again, as my dad prayed the Lord’s Prayer, I realized that it was never in the first person singular. It was always: “Give us this day our daily bread.” We’re all in this together; one person’s hunger is another’s duty.

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