Three columns in the print media over this past weekend had a common thread—the failures of our political system in dealing with the increasingly intractable problems our nation, state and community are facing. But who is to blame for those failures. Is it our elected leaders? Or do each of us share a large measure of the blame?

New York Times columnist Bob Herbert in “The Trivial Pursuit” begins by contrasting the media accolades Al Gore is now receiving for winning the Nobel Peace Prize and the treatment he received at the hands of that same media during the 2000 campaign. Then, the media constantly took Gore to task for such trivia as his taste in clothing, his personality, his sighing and rolling his eyes during one of the presidential debates, and his alleged exaggerations about his role in helping to create the internet. He notes that the voters in 2000 demonstrated “the collective maturity of 3-year-olds” and that we’ve paid a heavy price for our collective foolishness in selecting an immature son of privilege who led us into a calamitous war, stood idly by while a major American city still lies in ruins, and “blithely steered the nation into a bottomless pit of debt”.

Frank Rich in “The ‘Good Germans’ Among Us” is no less unsparing in his criticism of both the media and particularly the American electorate. He notes the slowness of both the press and the public to express outrage at the repeated atrocities being committed in our name in Iraq, including the ongoing use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” (at one time known as torture), the abuses at Abu Ghraib, and the repeated massacres of Iraqi civilians by American mercenaries employed by Blackwater USA. Rich attributes our collective complacency on our having been bought off with tax cuts, our reliance on an “auxiliary army of contractors” to supplement our small and overextended volunteer force, and our overall apathy towards affairs of state and the ease with which the Administration seems to be able to distract us, in Vice-President Gore’s words, “with triviality and artifice and nonsense”. But none of that excuses our own lack of outrage and action. Indeed, our insouciance is, in Rich’s view, perilously close to the crimes of omission perpetrated by the German people during the Third Reich, many of whom claimed after the War that they were unaware of the horrors that took place in their own communities.

Last but not least, Dan Carpenter brings these themes closer to home in “Letting leaders let us off easy”. Carpenter observes that once again candidates for local office are reassuring us that both taxes and public spending can be dramatically but painlessly reduced, all without adversely affecting the quality of our infrastructure, public safety, education, or the community’s general well-being. He reminds us that we have needs as a society that can’t be met on the cheap, and that we have a responsibility to one another to take care of each other in order to strengthen the bonds of community. Carpenter closes by saying that we must always ask ourselves whether it’s “we” that the politicians have failed rather than “me”, and if it’s the latter then we had better carefully re-examine our own priorities and values, lest we fall into the abyss of narcissism and selfishness and lose our humanity in the process.

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