from Progressive Democrats of America:
Remarks by Bill Moyers at the 40th Anniversary of Common CauseBy Bill Moyers
October 12, 2010
Washington, DC October 6, 2010 -— Thank you for inviting me to join in this 40th anniversary of Common Cause. Your founder, John Gardner, profoundly influenced my life and I welcome this opportunity to share some memories of him. When we met in 1965 John Gardner was already very wise and I was still very young. I never grew younger but he kept growing wiser. The chief of the New York Times bureau in Washington, Scotty Reston, drawing (I later learned) on Emerson, told me, “Take John as your mentor and you’ll see how to live the greatest number of good hours.”
He was right.
As we worked together—John as Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare and I as a White House Assistant—I came to know well the man who built meaning into his life because he saw no other way to achieve it. Meaning doesn’t come in the genes, he said—you compose it out of your own past, out of your own affections, out of the experience of human beings as it is passed on to you, out of the things you believe in, out of the values for which you are willing to sacrifice something. The ingredients are there, he said: You are the only person who can put them together in the unique pattern that will be your life.
One of my White House colleagues said of him,
“He thinks like a saint.” “No,” Lyndon Johnson said, “he thinks like a good Republican. They’re harder to find than saints. But one is all you need.” John was the one.
And he and Lyndon Johnson were the right two at the right time. Johnson: the intense, impetuous, impatient Democrat. Gardner: the reflective, righteous and resolute Republican. Both were radical middle of the roaders, who believed in widening the road into a broad highway so more people could travel it. When John joined the cabinet in 1965, he told us: “What we have before us are some breathtaking opportunities, disguised as insoluble problems.” He knew the score, and wasn’t intimidated by it. He wouldn’t be intimidated today in the midst of the largest special-interest-funded congressional campaign in our history. He would be outraged at all the dirty money pouring secretly into the political system, turning it into a sewer. And he would be engaged in trying to clean it up.
....(snip)....
Democracy in America has been a series of narrow escapes, and we may be running out of luck. The most widely shared assumption of our journey as Americans has been the idea of progress, the belief that the present is ‘better’ than the past and things will keep getting better in the future. No matter what befalls us—we keep telling ourselves—
‘the system works.’All bets are now off. The great American experiment in creating a different future together has come down to the worship of individual cunning in the pursuit of wealth and power, with both political parties cravenly subservient to Big Money. The result is an economy that no longer serves ordinary men and woman and their families. This, I believe, accounts for so much of the profound sense of betrayal in the country, for the despair about the future. As Gabriel says in James Weldon Johnson's epic Green Pastures:
“Everything that’s tied down is coming loose.” America as a shared project is shattered, leaving us increasingly isolated in our separate realities. ..............(more)
The complete piece is at:
http://www.pdamerica.org/articles/alliances/2010-10-12-13-01-00-alliances.php
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