The most intriguing sight that day before Christmas in 1990, the year that ended the Decade of Greed, was an old man in the Manhattan subway quietly plying his trade. Wearing a gentle smile, he set about each morning to collect bottles and cans. And as hurried shoppers, packages in hand, paused to watch, his swift hands cut and folded the discarded metal and glass into ornaments of red and gold and tan and green, studded with gems that shone like stars. His work was a form of redemption, in which the base and ignoble were transformed into something splendid and worthy.
The world was redeemed through one man born on Christmas Day, but no one man can redeem America.
Each new candidate promises he or she will be the one to transform America, but when change comes, the change often is for the worse. The one who will transform America for the better must possess the needed technical skill and an understanding of the material with which he or she works. If a man sets about to saw and hammer without an idea of what he hopes to build and without knowing the nature of wood, the result will be a disaster. And as he sees his work beginning to fail, he may hammer harder and saw more noisily, until in desperation he ends by cursing the wood.
The material out of which America is made is not iron and steel and concrete covered over with gold. The material out of which America is made is the individual heart and soul. And those who would lead America must build with the human heart and soul.
The setting free of America — its redemption — will not be accomplished by amassing more wealth. The redeemer of mankind was born in a stable, and his first bed was a manger filled with hay. He walked the country roads from Galilee to the Mediterranean as an itinerant preacher, once remarking that foxes had dens and birds had nests, but he was without a home. And so it was that all the great teachers of man, from Confucius and Socrates to Albert Schweitzer and Gandhi, have enjoined simplicity of living.
Abraham Lincoln, our greatest president, was born in a cold and drafty log cabin that had dirt for a floor and an oilcloth for a window, but he governed not merely with justice but by the principle of “malice towards none and charity towards all.” Lincoln, for many, was Christ-like.
Should America ever have the misfortune of meeting with a candidate who treats his friends and his foes and his many wives with malice, a candidate who build palaces and then covers his palaces with gold, then surely that man will prove to be the worst president in American history.
Let no one think this is an indictment of any one particular individual or any one particular party. The false principle that man is above all an economic animal created, governed and improved by material goods is shared by both parties and serves in the short run as a unifying principle in our national life. But if a nation fails to see that the life springs of a people are mercy and justice and love of one’s fellow man — if they are deluded into believing that man lives by bread alone — the never-ending pursuit of material goods will cause that people to sink lower and lower until they become as soulless as the commodities they idolize. And they, too, will then be packaged and commoditized, bought and sold and analyzed statistically to determine their worth to others.
And if this false view of the nature of man becomes ingrained, deep-rooted and incurable, a nation may well run the risk of electing a candidate who is himself the living embodiment of the sins of pride and avarice and their offspring, boasting, injustice, deceit, fraud and, above all, hardheartedness.
Fritz Spencer of Old Town is the former editor of the Christian Civic League RECORD.