'I think that we can perhaps meditate a little on those Americans ten thousand years from now...Let us hope that at least they will give us the benefit of the doubt, that they will believe we have honestly striven every day and generation to preserve for our descendants a decent land to live in and a decent form of government to operate under.'—Franklin Delano Roosevelt at Mt. Rushmore August 30, 1936.
The title above is a line from a poem I never finished, itself inspired by the painter J.M.W. Turner's unfinished poem Fallacies of Hope. (I liked the idea that there might also be guarantees.) Whatever it meant to me at the time, long ago, it seems even more resonant and relevant now.
Why do we get out of bed in the morning? Out of habit certainly, but at some level we have to believe that in the day ahead we may make some small incremental progress toward our goals, whatever they may be. A small improvement in the garden. The flourish of a job well done. We must have hope that we will find some joy in the day, some satisfaction that brings a sense of well-being. We must have something to look forward to.
That is enough for most people and in a decent land, in a decently ordered civil society, most people wake up confident in the unwritten guarantee that it is not too much to ask from life. It is achievable.
Unfortunately, the guarantee is crumbling away, almost everywhere, revealing the fallacies.
Economically, the world's wealth continues to accumulate in fewer and fewer hands. There are millions of refugees who will waste years of their lives in one tent city or another. They have mostly fled Middle Eastern conflicts which are in turn the direct consequence of more than 150 years of European interference and incompetence. (But that's another story.) Terrorist acts are now a global threat and reality as never before in history.
If we forget all that for a moment, and this is easy enough to do on a sunny day in Australia, we have problems of our own. There is a crisis in housing affordability and the price of electricity has risen to insane levels. Wages growth is slow, and going backwards in some cases. There is now a whole generation of people in casual work who will never have a full-time job or enough money to realise their dreams. (It's over for them. Why do they get out of bed in the morning?) The pressure is mounting and countless tragedies are unfolding behind closed doors.
Is this a decent land?
"We can almost forgive political leaders for failures of imagination, even failures of courage, but there seems to be an active principle at work - the deliberate and calculated denial of hope."
In the United States Donald Trump was elected to the Presidency on many promises to restore jobs and make his country great again. He has appointed a Cabinet of billionaires and between them they have not put forward a single idea that will benefit anyone, beyond giving extra pocket money to the rich in tax cuts. Their plan to take affordable health care away from millions of their fellow citizens is an exquisite exercise in what our late great Bob Ellis called 'sadomonetarism'.
Is America a decent land?
In the UK, masochism seems to be the order of the day as they throw away 50 years of patient, intelligent effort integrating with a strong and stable Europe.
We can almost forgive political leaders for failures of imagination, even failures of courage, but there seems to be an active principle at work - the deliberate and calculated denial of hope.
In our mediocre government, in the most mediocre Parliament formed in my lifetime, the greatest denier of hope is our Immigration Minister Peter Dutton, a zealot who has condemned thousands of asylum-seekers to indefinite detention in appalling conditions, and who clearly simmers with regret that he has not punished them enough. Perhaps it is simple sadism after all.
There are those who deny, and those who wish to give.
Franklin Roosevelt at Mt. Rushmore in 1936, meditating a little on those who would come after us in ten thousand years, also said 'Will they remember that we cared for each other?'
Will they?
John Ellison Davies lives in Gosford, NSW. He worked for many years in courts administration. His poems have appeared in Eureka Street.