the editor talks with you

Do you think everyone on the left has become a brainless ninny? They probably think you are brainless, too.

According to a recent survey conducted by More in Common, our differences have energized the far left and far right but have left most of us ready for something better.

The survey found that 87% of those who responded believe the country is more divided than at any point in their lifetime.

Another 86% fear our division will lead to increased violence and 89% say they want both Democrats and Republicans to find ways to compromise and get needed things done in the Washington swamp.

I thought about this when confronted with an amazing observation. We not only are a great nation – but we can and undoubtedly will become even greater.

Why is that? Because we are one of the world’s least developed nations.

That’s a surprising thought for one whose family has traveled the world, driven the back roads of our own country and talked with hundreds of people abroad and here at home. All of us feel inspired by the advances of civilization and yet disheartened by the use and abuse of those advances by men and women of selfish and evil intent.

The Wall Street Journal publishes each year at this time an essay first published in 1961. The author of that essay 57 years ago wrote: “Everywhere men turn their eyes today, much of the world has a truly wild and savage hue. No man, if he be truthful, can say that the specter of war is banished. Nor can he ... be sure that men of diverse kinds and diverse views can live peaceably together in a time of troubles.”

When that was written in 1961, America was far different. I was a young newspaper reporter covering the beginning of what became the civil rights movement.

It had caught the nation’s attention with the Montgomery bus boycott and had spread in non-violent protest at segregated schools, churches, water fountains, restrooms, movies and even lunch counters.

Each day at 11 am I walked from our newspaper to the largest retail store on North Tryon Street in Charlotte, NC.

I watched young black college students take seats at the segregated lunch counter and offer no resistance when uniformed police officers took them off to jail.

I would walk back to our office and hurriedly type 200 words about it in time to make the newspaper’s final edition.

I would then go to the courthouse where the protestors would be arraigned and interview their lawyers who would be asking a judge to set them free without bond.

It may be hard for you who were not around in those days to imagine that.

The 1961 essayist felt “the richness of this country was not born in the resources of the earth, though they be plentiful, but in the men that took its measure.

“We can remind ourselves that for all our social discord we yet remain the longest enduring society of free men governing themselves without benefit of kings or dictators.

“We are the marvel and the mystery of the world for that enduring liberty is no less a blessing than the abundance of the earth.”

We have much to do as we approach 2019 to develop ourselves and our country.

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