America's Best Idea

I know I usually just post pretty pictures for your consumption but today I feel like more substance is called for so I'm pausing our regularly scheduled programming to bring you the following essay by your truly. Feel free to send it on to anyone else you think might find it interesting and any constructive comments are more than welcome.

America’s Best Idea

I was just watching PBS' American Experience series on The Native American peoples and before the episode began PBS ran a trailer for Ken Burns' upcoming series on the National Parks. The tag line that they are using to promote the series is The National Parks: America's Best Idea. The assertion being that the notion or idea of The National Parks Service is the best idea that we as Americans have come up with. This idea got me to thinking; are they right? Is The National Parks Service the best idea that we as Americans have ever come up with. I can not dispute the notion that establishing a sort of National Trust in the name of all American Peoples, is in fact one of our greatest ideas. A trust who primary function is the assertion that this land, from sea to shining sea as the song goes, belongs to us all and shall be our inheritance to future generations, is a noble idea. However, I feel it is not in fact the single Greatest Idea our great nation has ever put forth into the world. For me, personally, America's Best Idea would have to be the creation of The New Deal. For it was The New Deal that for the first time in Human History established as an act of law the notion of public welfare. It first established as law the idea that we are all our brothers keeper. That if each of us flourish than we are all the better for it. Likewise if even one of us perish we all perish. The notion that we are all in this together and that is our duty to watch out for our neighbors was once thought to be the purvey of religions and philosophers; not legislators and certainly not the law of the land. What FDR did with the New Deal was upend all the precedent of Human History and Modern Democracy. Prior to the creation of the New Deal, priests and soup kitchens catered to the poor and destitute not the State. The very notion that the government need play a role in caring for our fellow man was incomprehensible. For the State is an extension of the broader populace and if the State was responsible for the welfare of all citizens than it followed that we as human beings we're also accountable. It was one of the first and clearest assertions that morality was in fact inseparable from good governance. We live in an era where the same people who say that God and morality are absent from Governance are the ones protesting the return to New Deal policies. FDR and the New Deal introduced morality to governance, they first asserted the notion that Morality is inseparable from democracy. Somewhere in the almost eighty years since the great depression people have forgotten that. They protest what they see as the re-establishment of a welfare state while they simultaneously bemoan the absence of God and Morality in public life. They call themselves the moral majority but what is more moral than caring for your fellow man. It is with this in my mind that I cannot help but feel that not only is The New Deal The Greatest Idea America has ever had but also an idea that, in these times especially, must be addressed before we forget what it meant.