“A Cockeyed Optimist” Sydney Williams
http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com
It is easy to be pessimistic:
Americans’ trust in government, according to a June 6, 2022 Pew Research Center study, has fallen from 75% in 1958 when the study began to 20% today. Total Fertility Rates, which measure the average number of children born to a female over their lifetime, have declined in the United States from 3.58 in 1960 to 1.64 in 2020. (To maintain population, the TFR must be 2.1.) The numbers portend a shrinking labor force and an increasing number of retirees. A February 2023 WSJ/NORC poll showed that only 21% of Americans feel their children will be better off financially than they are. Belief in God has fallen to 81%, down six percentage points from 2017, and the lowest since the question was first asked by Gallup in 1944.
Less than half of all Americans express a great deal of confidence in the military, with 77% of young Americans physically unfit to serve. Only 9% of those eligible to serve wish to do so, according to an op-ed in the April 15-16, 2023 issue of The Wall Street Journal by the authors of Superpower in Peril: A Battle Plan to Renew America. For more than fifty years, Cassandras have been predicting climate apocalypse. A generation ago, the UN Environment Program claimed that “…entire nations could be wiped off the face of the earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000.” Undeterred by past failures, they continue to predict catastrophe. The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recently issued a report: “We’re hurtling down the road to ruin and running out of time to change course.” Failure has not chastened these prophets of doom.
Wherever we turn, there is bad news. Crime rates and mass shootings make daily headlines, with perpetrators too often seen as “victims.” According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, weekly earnings for private-sector workers, adjusted for inflation, declined 3.6% over the past two years, the longest stretch since the 1970s. High school math and reading scores on international tests (PISA) remain low, while political indoctrination is high. Interest rates on U.S. Treasuries have risen, but remain below the rate of inflation, implying negative real returns. Abortion is a super-charged political issue, yet, according to the Guttmacher Institute, the number of abortions in the U.S. was 930 thousand in 2020 versus 1.6 million in 1990, and 93% of all abortions occur in the first trimester, according to the same source. Rational debate is off the table, and ignored is the wisdom of President Clinton from 1992: “Abortion should be safe, legal, and rare.” Keep in mind, we were all fetuses once and were given the chance to live. At this point, it looks like voters in 2024 could be faced with the same Hobson’s choice they had in 2020 – the Scylla of a cognitively challenged and corrupt Joe Biden, or the Charybdis of an ego-infested, unprincipled showman, Donald Trump. As a nation, can we not have better choices? Despite two individuals having declared for the Democrat primary, the DNC says there will be no Democrat primary debates.
The world is dangerous. Our enemies have the ability to nuke our cities. They have the means to disrupt our financial markets, banking and utility systems, and air travel, via cyber warfare or knocking out satellites. Commerce would be brought to a stand-still. And all the while, our political class is more interested in stuffing their bank accounts and gender identification than in enabling our military and cyber defense systems; universities are more interested in protecting students from harmful words than in preparing them to become good citizens, and the media would rather delegitimize those with conservative political views than expose weakness in our nation’s defense systems.
It is easy to see the future in dark tones. And yet, no matter how bleak the world seems; no matter how foolish politicians responsible for the management of our nation’s affairs act or how biased is the media, and no matter the phony accusations of racism, idiotic calls for stakeholder capitalism, or the encouragement of transwomen to compete in women’s sports, I awake each morning and thank God for the fortune to have been born and to live in this country at this time: Conservatives are speaking out. Parents are fighting to regain control of their children’s education. The Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard was recently formed, even though it has only attracted 71 faculty members out of 1,196 eligible. Young people are taking an interest in public service, brilliant and sensible ones like Vivek Ramaswamy – at 37, a man closer in age to my grandchildren than my children. Combined with others, these factors tell me that all is not lost. I look at our three children, their spouses, and the ten grandchildren they have produced, and I am inspired for the future – a future I may never see, but one in which I have hope, in which I believe.
The left has become shrill as they use authoritarian means to defend what they claim are democratic values: They do not allow school choice for the nation’s poor, because it violates the wishes of teachers’ unions; they substitute racism and gender preference for merit, thereby destroying the historic excellence of schools and colleges, an excellence which allowed people and the county to prosper; they demonize conservative blacks like Justice Clarence Thomas and Thomas Sowell for the temerity to think for themselves, rather than comply to a prescribed progressive line; they allow children as young as ten to select their gender preference, which has created an understandable backlash among concerned parents. The shrill left has invaded Wall Street and corporate board rooms, with innocent sounding calls for “stakeholder” capitalism, ignoring the fact that every successful company must balance the needs of owner/shareholders, employees, customers, and communities, without the need to train workers in “bias breaking,” “psychological safety,” and other forms of “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” words that mean whatever the corporate executive wants them to mean.
As for immigrants, the United States has always attracted those with a sense of “can-do.” Immigrants who come legally do not come for handouts. They are attracted by opportunities our nation offers: its freedom; its democratic form of government; its economy based on free market capitalism; and, most important, its belief in the individual, that if one uses his or her native talent, works hard, adheres to the law, respectful of others, and is personally responsible, then success will ensue. Education is at the core of individual success, which is why teachers’ unions have become an impediment, especially in the nation’s poorest sections. It is why the push for charter schools, or for letting money follow the student – for choice – is critical if we want to be fair to those less advantaged. And that push for choice has become more prevalent.
A pessimist is one who looks at the present and extrapolates all that is wrong and concludes that that is the future. An optimist is one who studies the past, lives the present, and then eyes the future and dreams of what is possible. With that as a definition, I remain an optimist. Reason tells me that the obstacles we face are formidable. It’s easy to be pessimistic, but in my heart, I feel as did Mitzi Gaynor in South Pacific, as war loomed around, when she sang: “I hear the human race/ is fallin’ on its face/ and hasn’t very far to go…But I’m only a cockeyed optimist.”
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