The Wages of Cynicism: An Election Reflection

Sermon by Stephen D. Edington, November 6, 1994

Lesson 13: Be confident that you can make a difference. Don't get overwhelmed. Sometimes when I get frantic about all I have to do and I spin my wheels, I try to recall Carlyle's advice: "Our main business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand." Try to take each day and each task as they come, breaking them down into manageable pieces for action while struggling to see the whole. And don't think you have to "win" immediately or even at all to make a difference.
In The Irony of American History, Reinhold Niebhur said: "Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we can do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we are saved by love..." Remember that sometimes it is important to look for things that matter and that many fruits of your labor will not be manifest for many, many years.
And do not think you have to make big waves in order to contribute. My role model, Sojourner Truth, could neither read nor write but could not stand slavery and second-class treatment of women. One day during an anti-slavery speech she was heckled by an old man. "Old woman, do you think that your talk about slavery does any good? Why I don't care any more for your talk than I do for the bite of a flea." "Perhaps not," she replied, "But the Lord willing, I'll keep you scratching."
A lot of people think they have to be big dogs to make a difference. That's not true. You just need to be a flea for justice bent on building a more decent home life, neighborhood, work place and America. Enough committed fleas biting strategically can made even the biggest dog uncomfortable and transform even the biggest nation, as we will and must transform America in the 1990s.
[from: The Measure of Our Success by Marian Wright Edelman]

Doing a sermon on a pre-election theme seemed like a reasonably good idea to me a month or so ago as I was sketching out a Sunday service schedule from then up through January. But as this date got closer and closer my enthusiasm and energy for the topic kept getting lower and lower. The cynicism and negativity that have so characterized this election season, and that I was so eager to decry, began to get to me, and I found myself thinking:

Why inflict a pre-election commentary upon my fine congregation when by now we've all had about as much 'commentary' as we can stand, and this Tuesday cannot come quickly enough?!

If cynicism is a disease, as I believe it is, I began to feel like the doctor who was succumbing to the very sickness he was trying to cure; and so it was with the admonition, Physician, heal thyself! that I set out to write these remarks. Last week I based my remarks on our 7th UU principle:

Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.

Today my "text", as it were, is the 5th principle which states that we affirm and promote

The right of conscience and the use of the democratic process in our congregations
and in society at large.

I begin by reminding myself that democracy in America has always been a pretty messy business. I have long learned to live with, and even come to appreciate the irony, that we have a system of governance that was founded on the loftiest of Enlightenment ideals about the human capacity for responsible self-government, while having that process of governance play itself out in some very un-lofty ways. I also know that there is a definite element of roguishness mixed up in American politics that we actually take a certain kind of delight, if not pride, in.

As an example of this, I happened onto a rebroadcast of a "colloquy", I guess you could call it, one evening on C-SPAN last week, where before the National Press Club, Haley Barbour, the Chair of the Republican National Committee, and a fellow called Jack White, who was an old Democratic Party operative in Texas politics, were swapping campaign war stories. I don't know what the pretext was for their being there, but that was what was going on. Mr. White recounted how he had worked in Lyndon Johnson's campaign in the 1948 Democratic primary race for the US Senate. In Texas in those days winning a Democratic primary was tantamount to being elected. LBJ, at the time, was a member of the House of Representatives and his opponent was the sitting Governor of Texas, "Coke" Stevenson. As Mr. White told the story, the Governor was well ahead of Johnson until he--Mr. Stevenson--made some kind of a misstep and enabled Johnson to make enough of a gain to make the race close. Mr. White finished his story by saying:

Now that [gain] didn't put us in the lead, but it got us close enough so that we could steal the rest of the votes we needed.

Everybody in the room, including Mr. Barbour, roared with laughter when he said that and I had a pretty good chuckle over it myself. Johnson did win that primary by 87 highly questionable votes, which sent him to the Senate and, in time, to the Presidency. Such stories of political shenanigans are part of our national folklore really. We do love our democratic ideals, but we're not exactly prudes when it comes to seeing how those ideals are sometimes lived out. Politics, as the saying goes, ain't beanbag.

Well, it ain't beanbag and never has been, but neither should our democratic engine be driven by wholesale cynicism--and this time around we're coming too close for comfort on that score. To cite just one of many possible examples, in the state of Virginia--the state that gave us Thomas Jefferson--the voters there in this year's Senate race are choosing between Oliver North and the incumbent, Charles Robb. One of North's own advisors has admitted that Voters think both of these guys are scum and then goes on to say that his job, along with the rest of the North team is to convince enough voters that "Ollie is the scum on your side. (Newsweek, Nov. 7, 1994. p.31) So you have one North's own campaign advisors defining that race in terms of which "scum" is more preferable. Well, I could spend the next several minutes reeling off a lot of similar "isn't this terrible" types of stories or anecdotes, but instead I'll share just a few of the matters that have come to weigh rather heavily upon me in an election season that I initially didn't give a whole lot of thought to. I have enough of a sense of humor that I have managed to have a few laughs over it, but it also seems to me that the healthy kind of skepticism on the part of the electorate in a democratic society that is indeed necessary to keep the leaders of that society honest, has flipped over in to a disempowering kind of cynicism where assigning blame--justified or not--has become an end in itself. [As I go along here I'm sure that some of my own political biases will come out, and I've decided to just let that happen and you can give them however much or however little weight you think they deserve. But I'm really not out to advance a political agenda today so much as I am to speak to the concern just cited.]

This fall it appears that blowing off steam in the name of a highly vague kind of discontent is somehow being mistaken for, or misconstrued as, true political dialogue and true participation in the democratic process. I can think of no better example of this than what comes over a lot of talk radio. I'm not shy about citing someone else's opinion or analysis when it happens to coincide with my own. In this past Thursday's Boston Globe, feature writer Ed Siegel did a very lengthy article on this subject in which he said:

At its best, talk radio has been the country's most democratic communication medium. The average citizen has his or her say ... Opponents can argue the pros and cons of a position ... But you would be hard pressed listening to Boston's AM talk radio these days to see many positive reflections of democratic dialogue. Except for the Jerry Williams show, it is a world in which feminists are compared on a daily basis with the worst mass murderers in history. Opponents regularly talk over each other. Half-truths and outright lies masquerade as facts. The radio town-hall forum sounds like a hate rally. Blacks, Latinos, immigrants, intellectuals and liberals need not apply on the phone lines unless they're cruising for a verbal bruising.

Mr. Siegel may be getting just a bit carried away himself there, but I think his overall point is sound. What could be a real forum for democracy, since practically everybody has a telephone and a radio, has instead largely--not exclusively, but largely--fallen into the hands of those who are making a self-aggrandizing career out of exploiting the anger, fear, and confusion that a good number of Americans appear to be feeling right now. What could be a populist roundtable for suggesting solutions to some of the real problems that do confront us (and in a few instances that is actually the case) has instead become largely a medium for meanspiritedness. I think the all time low in talk radio was reached last spring when on one of his broadcasts Rush Limbaugh remarked that there was a cat in the White House named Socks and a dog named Chelsea. This from a man who claims to offer a program of "ideas" and who gives his broadcast the high minded name of the "American Information Network", and then titillates his listeners by trashing the President's teenage daughter. Being a teenager is tough enough (and tougher a thousand times over if your father is President) without having some crude buffoon attempting to humiliate you in front of a nationwide audience. Anybody with a scintilla of decency about them would have tuned the man out once and for all right then and there. That obviously hasn't happened since he still draws his millions of listeners daily.

Having gotten my own anger off my chest, let me get back to the subject of anger in general. I know I've said on other occasions that anger can be a prelude to some very healthy kinds of renewal, both on the personal and societal level. I stand by that. But anger for its own sake, with no vision behind it, is dead end anger; it is a "no" that is uttered without the presence of a more deeper and sustaining "yes". I got a good example of this in a set of numbers I came across last week regarding Ross Perot's United We Stand America organization. In 1993, in the aftermath of the presidential campaign, this organization's membership stood at 1.3 million people; now it shows 300,000 on its rolls. In Massachusetts the drop over that same period of time has been from 26,000 to 6,000. I'm aware that statistics can be read in any number of ways (so to speak), but what these figures suggest to me is that there is only so far you can go on anger and cynicism alone, and that was what was primarily driving the Perot campaign. As one of the now "retired" operatives of UWSA for Massachusetts--a Mr. Richard Robertson--put it:

We were being critical without coming up with constructive criticism ... (we became) a shooting gallery of everything that's wrong. (Newsweek November 7, 1994. p.35).

But for me to point out the shortcomings of blowing off steam for its own sake--as part of a political process--doesn't get at where the anger, fear, and confusion are coming from in the first place. This seems to be one of the great mysteries that social and political commentators are trying to solve this fall as I read through all their analyses. [And I must admit, I am a political junkie although I never have and most likely never will run for public office. I'll pore over an analysis of a Congressional race in Idaho in a way that other folk will soak up a Barbara Cartland novel.] Our unemployment rate is at a four year low, manufacturing is up, the economy is reasonably sound; our most recent foreign military operations in Haiti and Kuwait have met with basic approval--albeit rather slowly, if not grudgingly, in Haiti. And yet this is the year of the supposedly angry, volatile, and disillusioned voter. How so? Part of the answer lies, I feel, in the level of uncertainty about personal economic security regardless of how improved the numbers may look. Having grown up in a family where living from paycheck to paycheck would have been considered a luxury I can certainly empathize with that. My father was a self-employed house painter, and he/we lived from job to job. When the jobs came in he got paid and when they didn't he didn't. And this was in the post-war economic boom of the 1950s. Even a young child can tune in to the insecurity of a home atmosphere like that and I certainly did, and I still remember the feeling well. [My father was a staunch Republican incidentally, but he never blamed his situation, however difficult it got, on politicians or politics. He just plugged away at getting work wherever he could.]

But this discontent runs deeper than economic security, or lack thereof. I think the liberal columnist, Anthony Lewis, put it quite succinctly in this past Friday's New York Times. The thrust of the column was his speculation on the role the religious right might come to play in a politically strengthened and emboldened Republican party and that was a bit unsettling, to say the least. But in the middle of the piece Mr. Lewis took time out to say this:

Many who have nothing to do with the Christian right are distressed by aspects of American society today: The romanticization of violence and vulgarity, the rise of illegitimacy, the decay of responsibility. For me, these are fundamental challenges to a decent society.

Very well said. There are, as Mr. Lewis so well puts it, "fundamental challenges to a decent society" that are going unmet right now. This concerns me a great deal. I believe that that is where a lot of this undefined and unfocused voter discontent is coming from; from the sense that we are coming up short when it comes to meeting those "fundamental challenges to a decent society" and are feeling powerless to do anything about it.

I think it's important for us to bear in mind that some of these challenges can be met through the political process and some cannot. The issues Tony Lewis refers to, in admittedly broad categories, are both political and spiritual. On the political side, we elect people to public office so that they can bring the workings of government to bear in solving and resolving some of these challenges. We vote, I would presume, for those whom we feel can best and most effectively meet such challenges and who share our political philosophy. On the spiritual side, it's a little trickier: Do we elect candidates to office with the expectation that they be our spiritual redeemers or guides as well as our managers of government? Think about it. In addition to wanting fair and effective administrators of government who are also consonant with our political views, we also want bearers of vision and hope--men and women who will show us the way to a freer, fairer, and more just society. There is nothing irrational or unreasonable in wanting that of a public office holder, but it is a mighty tall order to ask of any mortal human being who's just trying to get elected or re-elected. What I am struggling to say here (and its hard to get words around it) is that there is only so much spiritual uplift that we can reasonably expect to come from the political arena. We have to assume a good deal of the responsibility for that on our end--in how we conduct our lives, and raise our children, and work to improve our communities, and meet some of the unmet needs of our fellow citizen in whatever ways we can. I really believe in that old adage that "if the people will lead the leaders will follow."

I know the anti-incumbency fervor has waned a bit over the past couple of weeks, but it's certainly still out there, and I relate it to what I've just been trying to say. To open with the obvious, the mere fact that one is holding office does not entitle them to keep it; that's one reason why we have elections, to maintain the accountability of those whom we elect. But this time around the anti-incumbent mood has something of a ritualistic cant to it, as if we're trying to purge our anger, disillusionment, and cynicism by sacrificing up any available incumbent we can get in our electoral sights. "Voting the rascals out" is a time honored American tradition, but I feel something is awry when we just vent our frustrations, in a wholesale fashion as it were, on an office holder without a whole lot of thought as to who we may be replacing that person with and why we are doing it.

I said earlier I'd probably tip my political hand somewhere along the line today. If I haven't done that already, I'm about to do it now. To invoke Tony Lewis' phrase one more time, I believe our President, over the past two years, has made very sincere and dedicated attempts to meet those "fundamental challenges to a decent society." He has made his share of missteps and has, at times, fallen prey to his own uncertainties. On health care reform I believe he tried to do too much too quickly and did not adequately bring into the process all of the players to whom he and his wife should have been listening. But I believe he has tried--and to a notable extent has succeeded--in combining political acuity with a sense of compassion and caring for the citizens of his, and our, country. Personally, I think he deserves far better than he's gotten over the past few months. He clearly does not deserve the cynical way in which House Minority Whip Newt Gingrich has characterized him and his party as "the enemy of normal Americans." Mr. Clinton did not serve in the military; neither did I; neither did a lot of good Americans who love and care deeply about their country, and who have a lot to give to it. When Senate candidate Oliver North disavowed the President as "not my commander-in-chief" he shamelessly and cynically demeaned the Office of President, the person who holds that office, and most emphatically, himself as he now seeks a seat in the legislative body for which only a few short years ago he showed unbridled contempt.

Well, like I said at the outset, the paradox of democracy is that it is founded on some of the loftiest of human ideals while, at times, catering to the lowest of human behavior. Our republic has lived with that paradox for over 200 years now and we will continue survive and thrive and grow, I'm sure. We will survive, thrive, and grow so long as the bulk of our citizenry continues to believe in the great experiment that was begun here in the late 1700s. Clearly no one election campaign is going to undermine that belief on any large or lasting scale, but this one does give a timely opportunity to reflect upon the wages of cynicism, as I've put it. For the wages of cynicism--at its worst--is the loss of hope, the loss of vision, and the loss of a sense of possibility. This is true at the personal, the societal, and the political levels. Cynicism is what occurs when anger, fear, or disillusionment become ends in themselves rather than serving as a prod for moving towards more positive possibilities.

As I mulled all that over this past week, Marian Wright Edelman's words, which I read earlier, came as a gift for they offer some good guideposts as to what it means to participate in a positive way in the workings of a democratic society. She starts with the practical and immediate:

Don't get overwhelmed ... take each task as it comes while struggling to see the whole, and don't think you have to 'win' immediately or even at all to make a difference.
Then, quoting the theologian Reinhold Niebhur she--through him--offers the long view:
Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime, therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing that is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history, therefore we much be saved by faith. Nothing that we can do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone, therefore we are saved by love.
And then she goes on, citing her heroine Sojourner Truth, about the importance of being a flea for justice in the body politic:
A lot of people think they have to be big dogs to make a difference. That's not true. You just need to be a flea for justice bent on building a more decent home life, neighborhood, work place, and America. Enough committed fleas biting strategically can make even the biggest dog uncomfortable and transform even the biggest nation, as we will and must transform America in the 1990s.

Finally, I think what else is needed to move us from cynicism to a sense of possibility is a willingness to speak to one another--and seek solutions to problems with one another-- across the political spectrum rather than attempting to shout each other down or, in a usually shallow-minded way, score political points at another's expense. I realize that that is a terribly naive thing to ask for during a political campaign, so I guess I can wait a couple of more days for it. Truth to tell, I'm not at all convinced that our political campaigns and elections are the best, or the most important, example of what it means to be a democracy; although I know that is the thing a lot of Americans would point to. Personally, I think a much better example is when citizens of varying political loyalties and persuasions, but with some common aspirations for their community, speak to and work with one another in pursuit of those aspirations. My issue with a lot of talk radio--as came out earlier--is that instead facilitating such a dialogue, as it is well placed to do, it caters instead to the shouting and the shallow minded point scoring.

I think of the two community boards I serve on here in Nashua, one having to do with mental health services and one with affordable housing. I wish I could give more time to them than I do. I'm greatly impressed with the dedication of the people I've met through these involvements. And in addition to liking the people, and working at the tasks we try to accomplish, what is also gratifying about being on these committees is that, whatever the range of political opinion that is on them, we've little time and little need for political posturing. There are many times when, in order to accomplish some of our goals, we have to deal with the political powers that be; and sometimes those dealings are friendly and sometimes we have to be the fleas that bite the dog. Either way, it has impressed upon me the reality that one cannot ignore the workings of the political processes at the local, state, and national levels if you are truly concerned about the quality of life in your community And neither can you afford to be cynical about the workings of those processes--skeptical and even suspicious at times, but not cynical or defeatist.

So, keep the faith, friends. In this case, faith in the old Universalist precept that we live in an ever perfectible world, but one that we will never see come to full perfection. Reinhold Niebhur was probably right, Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime, therefore we must be saved by hope. Dr. Niebhur did not live to see me take heart from his words, but he wrote them in the hope that they would find meaning in other lives beyond the one he was living. And so it is with our efforts to be bearers of a more abundant life; we make those efforts in the hope that they, too, will find meaning in the lives beyond the ones we are living.

Unitarian Universalist Church of Nashua

The Wages of Cynicism: An Election Reflection