Needed: individual awareness of a new sense of nationhood
Whatever the institutional mechanics of it, the real renovation of America must begin in Americans' minds. It must express itself in their civic morale, their sense of individual responsibility for themselves, for the communities and the nation around them. It is not enough to say that the Government has failed, that the System has failed. That accusation subtly absolves individual citizens of blame but also leaves them feeling like abjectly passive victims of immense conspiracies—bureaucracies, multinational corporations. No society can flourish, or even function, if its people do not feel responsible for it any more.
America will get better only when Americans are convinced that it is up to them to make it better. For a decade or more Americans have tended to behave like submissive passengers aboard a national vehicle that veered unpredictably across the landscape: a succession of distracted presidential drivers kept coming up with the steering wheel loose in their hands. The great enterprise, the distressed passengers began to tell themselves, was probably headed for no good end, but in any case, it was beyond their control.
Larger and darker forces were at work:
inflation, crime, OPEC, the crippling onset of vulnerability and mediocrity, the shame of Watergate, the humiliation of Viet Nam. The grace that historically seemed to have attended American ventures appeared to have been mysteriously withdrawn, and the people fell into an apprehensive gloom, like adolescents suffering the sudden and unexpected disapproval of their fathers: of history.
The loss of American self-confidence was especially shocking because previous generations had seemed so powerful and virtuous. In the spring of 1941, while Hitler was busy extinguishing Europe, William Saroyan wrote a ripely sentimental play for CBS radio called The People with Light Coming Out of Them. Those luminous people were the Americans, heroic with their sappy "gosh," their shy Jimmy Stewart goodness. ("Sentimental? You bet! Say, this is a swell country, and ...") Saroyan's protagonist sent a sweet democratic vision through radio sets across the American night, a period piece:
"Look at the light shining out of those humble houses. That light is the light of a happy nation, a free and growing people, a people without fear, a people who love instead of hate, whose casual everyday humanity is stronger than any other power in the world ... The best in people from all over the world is growing here into the first real nation of the world —the American nation." A few months after the broadcast, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, and the People of Light went overseas and saved the world.
It has been a while since Americans have felt that way about themselves. All the notorious national wounds left many with a wintry, elegiac view of the country and its future. The nation that was once the world's most famous optimist began to shuffle around in a bathrobe, feeling mediocre and depleted, listening to threnodies by the Club of Rome.