Eisenhower first thanks the broadcast networks for the opportunity to address the nation, ever mindful that the air time they gave him took away from Dobie Gillis and Ozzie and Harriet, which surely cost them money.  Then he makes clear that the United States is under very real threat, and although he never uses the word communist, no one listening to the speech was uncertain about his meaning:

We face a hostile ideology global in scope, atheistic in character, ruthless in purpose, and insidious in method. Unhappily, the danger it poses promises to be of indefinite duration.

What the speech is truly about is holding fast to our values during a crisis, and not hoping for some miraculous or sweeping change to save us from the perils that our nation will face.  At a time like now when each fresh news report or disaster brings sweeping calls for new laws that might have protected us against each crisis, it is striking to hear his words:

Crises there will continue to be. In meeting them, whether foreign or domestic, great or small, there is a recurring temptation to feel that some spectacular and costly action could become the miraculous solution to all current difficulties…

But each proposal must be weighed in the light of a broader consideration: the need to maintain balance in and among national programs, balance between the private and the public economy, balance between the cost and hoped for advantages, balance between the clearly necessary and the comfortably desirable, balance between our essential requirements as a nation and the duties imposed by the nation upon the individual, balance between actions of the moment and the national welfare of the future.

In the wake of the BP Gulf oil spill, it is worth listening Ike say

As we peer into society’s future, we — you and I, and our government — must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering for our own ease and convenience the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage.

And of course, the armaments industry:

Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense. We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security alone more than the net income of all United States cooperations — corporations…

Now this conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — is felt in every city, every Statehouse, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet, we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources, and livelihood are all involved. So is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

As the 50th anniversary of this speech falls on Martin Luther King, Jr Day, just days after a member of the Defense Department suggested that Martin Luther King, Jr, would have understood and approved of our military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan.  But just six years after Eisenhower’s farewell speech, Dr King said,

I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube.

We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem.

These commemorations come at a time when our Vice President has called Julian Assange a “high-tech terrorist,” for publishing documents alongside The New York Times that contribute to what Eisenhower called “an alert and knowledgeable citizenry.”

These commemorations come at a time when a Member of our Congress lies in a hospital room with half of her skull sawed off, recovering from a bullet wound that every talking head on TV refuses to link to the anti-government speech of one of our political parties, or to the armaments industry that Eisenhower warned us of.

It comes at a time when birds are falling out of the sky and fish are washing up on shores with mysterious illnesses, and scientists point to “indigestion” and “stress,” as possible causes but never dare to bring up the toxic dispersant used to clean up the BP oil spill that is known to cause disfigurement and death to marine and human life.

As we mark this occasion today, let us honor Dr. King’s legacy and heed President Eisenhower’s warning.  We must recognize that our struggles are the same as they were fifty years ago, and while many things are better, many things are also worse.  We must not allow Eisenhower’s or King’s words to be oversimplified, taken out of context and obscured.  And we must remember to demand that our core American values, now marginalized as “far-left,” were once so pervasive as to be embraced by the Right.

Read/Listen to the speeches:

President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Farewell Address, January 17, 1961

Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Beyond Vietnam – A Time to Break Silence, April 4, 1967

Since 1980, fiscal conservatives have pretty much won the battle of ideas with a simple formula of “government = bad” and “you work hard and should get to keep all your money.” What this ingenious marketing campaign did was to convince Americans to allow the 25-year dismantling of the entire regulatory system and public infrastructure in the United States, so proudly built during the New Deal. The very very wealthiest Americans have gotten wealthier by several orders of magnitude, but the merely well-to-do (on down) have not seen their taxes become substantially lower. The overall impact has been to leave this country with a welfare system that was taken away from people and handed to corporations. In the collapse of our infrastructure lies opportunity for growth, privatization, and profit for a select few. In its wake lies broken levees, collapsed bridges, collapsed mines, fallen cranes and contaminated food.

A new narrative needs to be created to re-build the society that we had for most of the 20th Century, in which government played a necessary role in protecting us from harm, whether it comes from nature, neglect or profit. When we focus only on the individual being responsible for himself, many may live well, but at much greater cost to their neighbor. When we make sacrifices for our common good, we all live richer lives.
Weather is random and unpredictable, but only when and where it occurs. The consequences on real people of weather disasters are largely preventable or at least can be greatly mitigated. We are going to see climate change and disease bring ever-greater numbers of casualties closer and closer to home. We need to stop seeing them as random acts and make all of the appropriate causal connections, not just by dutifully recycling and buying hybrids, but by changing the way we think about the values that our society is built upon. We are much better suited facing our problems together than as individuals and must connect that narrative to everything that we do.

Great Lakes Danger Zones? (Center for Public Integrity)

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Other parts of the world have their localized horror stories as well. Londoners have been worrying for years about the disappearance of sparrows, a concern which is now moving on to continental Europe. And there’s lots of prominent coverage if you happen live near one of one hundred “dead zones” around the world, massive sections of oceans and seas rendered lifeless as a consequence of the chemicals used by industrial food production.

But the only reason that these particular stories have gotten the level of attention that they have, is because they have all been somewhat unexpected. The massive global extinction of up to 40% of the species on earth that is currently underway and largely predicted by scientists, is not getting much media attention. Perhaps this is because it is not related to a single problem that can be fixed, but rather by the systematic overlap of different causes, industries and lifestyles. Or perhaps because most of the problems are likely being caused by the advertisers that support the commercial news industry.

Exactly ten years ago, The Washington Post reported that scientists were largely in agreement that we were in the midst of the largest mass extinction this planet has seen since the dinosaurs stopped roaming the earth. That story was on page A4 of the Post, relegated to obscurity for the front page placement of news on President Clinton’s groundbreaking but unfunded needle exchange program proposal, and the relative weakness of the Shiites in unstable and ethnically torn Iraq, which Clinton would bomb by the end of that year.

In the ensuing decade, the Bush Administration, which has engaged in strict censorship of all government scientists since taking office, has made it increasingly difficult to even get species listed as endangered under the Endangered Species Act. And as reports of massive danger to species grow over these years, the species lost forever are growing less obscure and now threaten beloved tens of millions of birds, gorillas and chimpanzees, and of course, the Yangtze River Dolphin.

Further Resources:

massextinction.net

World Wildlife Fund

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