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When I was a teen growing up in Schenectady, N.Y., during the early '70s, I had an alcoholic neighbor whose favorite saying was, "The trouble with people is that they are no damn good." I was friends with his son, and whenever I'd go over to hang out at his house, his father would sidle up to me as though we were in a cocktail lounge, put his hand on my shoulder, and mutter his cranky credo.
I didn't immediately make the connection between his soft-spoken, liquor-laced presentation and my own father's hard, locked-in mistrust of people and the world. But I realize now that if drink could have loosened my father's tongue, he probably would have said the same thing.
As a child, my father experienced the anti-Semitism of the Poles and then barely escaped the Holocaust, fleeing Warsaw with his family just one week before Hitler invaded. Still, that doesn't explain everything. Anne Frank, born five years after my father, got trapped in the same genocide he escaped. And yet, holed up in her hiding place with Nazis prowling the streets below, she wrote in her diary, "In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart."
I don't think she was naive. On the same page, she writes of feeling "the suffering of millions," of being able to hear the "ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too." Yet she held onto her belief in the goodness of humanity.
Over the years I've come to realize how much our basic opinion about humanity has vast repercussions -- not only on our personal lives, but also on our politics. If you assume people are "no damn good," you will probably favor more police officers and prisons, and you may not see anything wrong with capital punishment. You will also favor fences, walls and barriers of all kinds, and believe that it is prudent and perhaps necessary to own a gun. It's likely you will have supported George W. Bush in his pre-emptive war against Iraq, maybe even after you learned that he depended on lies and deceptions to carry it out. After all, life is about choosing the lesser of two evils.
And what if you think that people are "really good at heart"? Though you may be a dove, you will not necessarily be a starry-eyed dreamer. Many of those making the most basic contributions to society fall into this category: nurses, teachers, social workers, counselors. These individuals typically believe that it's better to rehabilitate people than to lock them up, and that negotiation and diplomacy are better than the use of tactics of domination and the last resort of war. They see true peace and security arising from goodwill and generosity, and probably keep a good book rather than a gun by their pillow.
I don't mean to suggest that everyone falls solidly into one category or the other. We have all internalized both attitudes to some degree, and they vie for ascendancy, depending on what is happening in our lives, and in the larger world. In times of peace and harmony we find more people agreeing with Anne Frank. In times of suspicion and mistrust, such as we find ourselves facing now, my alcoholic neighbor's rant has the world's ear.
It's not because of the events of Sept. 11, 2001. Yes, 9/11 was a defining moment, but there were many ways we could have defined it. The way the Bush administration chose has made us more afraid and has given us more to fear. All the wonderful promise of a new millennium has been subsumed by alerts of yellow, orange and red.
There are many ways to make our country a safer and more secure place. As Samantha Collier, chief medical officer of HealthGrades, points out, far more people die each year from hospital errors than died when the Twin Towers fell. According to Collier, "The equivalent of 390 jumbo jets full of people are dying each year due to preventable, in-hospital medical errors, making this one of the leading killers in the United States."
But hospital errors, infant mortality, AIDS and a host of other threats have not been a priority for Bush. Nor does it seem they will be for McCain if he gets elected.
See more stories tagged with: bush, 9/11, gop, obama, election08, mccain, politics of fear
Mark Klempner is a social commentator, historian and author of The Heart Has Reasons: Holocaust Rescuers and Their Stories of Courage. He would like to thank James McConkey and others who commented on an early version of this piece: Amy Denham, Paul Glover, Gerry McCarthy, Alice McDowell, Nicole Sault and Richard Silverstein.
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