What’s to be Done about the State of the American Union

Shortly before he died, Martin Luther King, Jr., penned a scorecard for assessing the state of the American union that President Barack Obama would be wise to keep in his hip pocket throughout the coming year as a valuable aid to his own thinking, whatever it may be prudent for him to say in his annual address to the nation. King noted that we face three great obstacles to Americans’ security and shared well-being: our nation’s social history of racism and its continuing economic and experiential legacy, our habit of tolerating poverty in whole regions of our country and areas of our cities, and our ever-readiness to go to war instead of pursuing the peace we really need.

These three costly bad habits still constitute a national blind side that we have trouble overcoming exactly because many of us still believe that willingness to change is a sign of weakness—“I am what I am” and “I gotta be me”—even if that means that someone must suffer as others go to the bank. Many still think that economic stratification and the laws of supply and demand are basic laws of nature, instead of Adam Smith’s rough summary of how things seemed to work (even if imperfectly) in his home town in the late 1700’s as Scotland was starting to industrialize and several Western nations were struggling over others’ land, labor, and assets to build powerful empires. We cannot easily change the direction of history they set so long ago, though America’s founders knew the habits of empire were wrong and dangerous, and therefore created some intellectual tools for gradually transforming them, even as they recognized that they themselves could not entirely escape them. Establishing a new nation on the basis of imperial land grants and slave labor makes it hard for inheritor generations to function as a democratic republic in which all are free and equal.

This is why we still struggle with an unjust legacy of inherited bad habits as well as unequal means and opportunities, though King’s scorecard would give our nation credit for making some progress during the past fifty years. We have ended legal segregation on the basis of race, but the economic segregation to which the old racism gave rise continues to segregate our nation residentially into locations of radically unequal opportunities for education, jobs, housing, and health care. Many still tolerate someone else’s poverty as if it were a character flaw or at least bad luck, firmly believing that our earnings reflect our effort and merit alone, instead of the workings of history within a global economic and social system that overvalues some contributions while undervaluing others, hiding its actual levers and who pulls them behind a noise-screen of “free choice.” Lastly, as a new year of America’s history begins, here we still are, stuck in wars that drain our resources and our will to change our domestic fortunes, when what we really need is peace. The question is not whose fault these are, but rather what’s to be done about them and how quickly.

What we need to do first is to stop telling ourselves that war is glorious or at least necessary, and start telling ourselves that war is an abomination, and that we must figure out why we keep going down that path and find a better way. That will require, as King said, that we recognize that we’re all in this together, and that you don’t balance a nation’s budget and strengthen its future position by deciding not to educate the kids and waiting for a fairy godmother on Wall Street to create the jobs their parents need. Finding this better way must begin, like any reasonable response to an unworkable situation in life, by telling t