[Faith-talk] Jimmy Carter's Prophetic Warning

[Ericka]

Usually the stuff is a bunch of garbage that I get in my inbox. But I have a great respect for Jimmy Carter. I'm not trying to insult anyone as I believe in bipartisan politics which means everyone is working together for the best of everyone represented.

https://m.dailykos.com/stories/2017/7/23/1683244/-Jimmy-Carter-s-Prophetic-Warning?detail=emaildkre

Jimmy Carter's Prophetic Warning

The Newark Star-Ledger has a story by John Farmer, Jr., in its ‘Perspective’ section today about a 1979 speech by then-President Jimmy Carter. [I will feel free to exceed normal fair-use standards in quoting from Carter’s speech, since that’s a matter of public record.]

Carter warned of a spiritual crisis that he identified as toxic to American ideals. … [H]e might have had the lifestyle and values of his 21st-century successor [and his Congress] in mind:

Too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we’ve discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning.

…

You see every extreme position defended to the last vote, almost to the last breath by one unyielding group or another. You often see a balanced and fair approach that demands sacrifice, a little sacrifice from everyone, abandoned like an orphan without support and without friends. ...

Farmer goes on to note that the reaction to Carter’s speech was negative, and paved the way for Reagan—too cerebral and considered, and not emotional, feel-good or feel-angry.

Carter warned the nation against following the “path that leads to fragmentation and self-interest”, for “down that road lies a mistaken idea of freedom, the right to grasp for ourselves some advantage over others”.

Our entertainment media, says Farmer, have regularly celebrated wretched individual excess, and thereby cheapened the very idea of individual freedom, “reducing it from the preservation of conscience to the satisfaction of appetites. Our politics has come … to mirror this self-indulgence.”

Further connections are made to the NRA/business-directed extreme gun-rights movement, to mainstreaming of pornography, to money being equated to speech, and to news programs that value eyeballs and profits over any public responsibility.

We have lost our way … because we have exalted “a mistaken idea of freedom"; our self-indulgence had led us to assert every right as absolute, every form of compromise or regulation as inimical to freedom, and … to elevate the very avatar of self-absorption to the highest office in the land.

For me (and for Farmer), two conclusions emerge: First, that Carter was definitely undervalued as president—his rating due more to the temper of the times and changes in the national mood than to his inherent merits. Second, that the cultural changes that led us to where we are now were percolating well before the election of Ronald Reagan as President.



Ericka Short

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