Changing our Destiny

Once you start down the path to the Dark Side,

Forever will it dominate your destiny.

-Yoda

I admit that the first President I honestly remember is Ronald Reagan.  You are all welcome to feel sorry for me, or to feel old, whichever happens to strike you.  I remember hearing about Reagan winning the election against someone named Jimmy Carter.  It seemed at the time, that Reagan was the perfect guy for the Oval Office, he was slick, he could crack a joke, he had pretty good hair, and he was hawkish enough to make us feel safe.  Over the years though, the legacy of the Reagan years had been a mixed bag to say the least.  He played a major role in toppling the Soviet Union, but his economic policies have proven to be the path to the Dark Side (they were successful in the short term, but lead you to ruin in the long run).

As I grew up, I became interested in learning a bit about Jimmy Carter, the plainspoken southern gentleman that got his political butt handed to him.  History generally shares the opinion that Carter was a ineffective, if not incompetent President, and I'm not a political expert, so I won't argue that point.  In my opinion though, it strikes me that Carter was perhaps the best human being to ever have the misfortune of being elected President.  Carter is intelligent, insightful, with deep moral convictions and consistent ethical principles; in other words, he was bound to be a lousy President.

It saddens me that such admirable, humane qualities are almost anathema to successful politicking.  It saddens me that, even a Democratic populist like Obama, feels the need to engage in saber rattling and sending messages via tomahawk missile.  This, I suspect, is largely a result of our system turning down the path to the Dark Side.  Nixon resigned about a week after I was born, Ford bumbled and stumbled through a few years, and Carter was elected, I surmise, as a sort of anti-Nixon, a relative outsider to the political system, a solid citizen, and rather determined to do things a different way.

But Iran, OPEC and the USSR were a little too big and scary for us to trust to a peanut farmer from Georgia, with a down-home accent and a decidedly not-made-for-TV sort of look.  Never mind that he was a brilliant guy, never mind that he always tried to do the right thing and keep a cool head, not good enough, I guess we needed Reagan and his cowboy-actor bluster, or maybe that's just what we deserved.

If Carter had won, maybe we would have actually learned the lessons of Vietnam about not being able to be the sheriff of the world.  If Carter had won maybe we would have gotten more of a start on responsible environmental and economic stewardship, instead of Reagonomics and unchecked ecological pillaging.

I don't know for sure, I was only six, and I grant you that I am judging Carter largely by his later work, the wisdom of which is due largely in part to his being chewed up and spit out by the world of politics, but I know that his Law Day speech in 1974 is one of the finest examples of rhetoric this side of MLK's I have a Dream speech, and it proves that he is no wimp, he's bold enough to call out a room full of southern lawyers about voting rights.  If you have the time, read what then Governor Carter had to say, particularly read the little homespun tale about having a handful of rocks for his slingshot and having to put them down to get cookies from his Mama.  Now think about any other president in the last 40 years that would honestly put down the rocks...

American politics has gone down the path to the Dark Side.  It didn't look that bad in the Reagan years, but by now we have found out what life is like inside Vader's mask.  If we had taken the path of integrity and common sense, instead of the quick, easy path, we might not be where we are now, if we had just put down the rocks...