Cynical eye distorts view of our nation

Atlanta Journal Constitution ^ | May 28, 2006 | Jim Wooten

[fgoodwin]

Cynical eye distorts view of our nation

http://www.ajc.com/opinion/content/opinion/wooten/stories/052806.html
http://tinyurl.com/j7fzr

Published on: 05/28/06

Sometimes confession can be good. Herewith, a confession. I'm in a business that's too jaded living in an era that's too cynical. Two events of the past week evoke that feeling.

And it is just that. A feeling. Admittedly, one reinforced by the day's readings.

The first event of note was last Sunday's first-ever commencement address by the publisher of The New York Times, Arthur Sulzberger Jr. The second was a memorial service at Christ the King Lutheran Church in Norcross for Brig. Gen. John W. Gillette, a dedicated patriot who died May 18 at a hospice in Austin, Texas.

Intentionally or not, Sulzberger's speech at the State University of New York at New Paltz reflected the era's cynicism and the eternal American idealism.

"I'll start," said Sulzberger, "with an apology. When I graduated from college in 1974, my fellow students and I had just ended the war in Vietnam and ousted President Nixon. OK, that's not quite true. Yes, the war did end, and yes, Nixon did resign in disgrace, but maybe there were larger forces at play.

"Either way, we entered the world committed to making it a better, safer, cleaner, more equal place. We were determined not to repeat the mistakes of our predecessors. We had seen the horrors and futility of war and smelled the stench of corruption in government.

"Our children, we vowed, would never know that. So, well, sorry. It wasn't supposed to be this way. You weren't supposed to be graduating into an America fighting a misbegotten war in a foreign land."

Idealism laced with cynicism. It's a toxic brew, but one that has become the latté of the coffeehouse intelligentsia, at least in the era since Sulzberger graduated from college.

The America most often described by the left's politicians and commentators, the one for which the publisher apologizes, is a reprehensible corruption that hardly inspires idealism. It's a venal place where immigrants and the weak are exploited, the greedy unchecked, the environment despoiled, where business and politics are corrupt and where soldiers' lives are pennies tossed as wishes into a fountain. How utterly wrong that view is.

Days after Sulzberger's address, I am in a church pew. The memorial service is for a former assistant adjutant general for the Georgia Army National Guard, John Gillette, who had moved to Texas to be near his two children, Leslie and Robert.

There is much remarkable about his life. Most memorable from my association — I served way below Gen. Gillette upon joining the Guard in 1977 — was what I came to recognize as a defining characteristic of men and women who had sacrificed and endured extraordinary hardship like the Depression or World War II and even the Korean conflict.

He certainly had done that. In college in his native Ohio at the outbreak of World War II, he abandoned studies for the cause, enlisting as a private and serving as a combat infantryman in Europe.

After the war, he completed college and joined the Guard, continuing what would become more than 50 years of patriotic service, 23 of them in the Georgia Guard. He retired in 1983, but continued another 10 years as the commander of the Georgia State Defense Force, a volunteer group.

Gillette's defining characteristic, seen in others who had survived his war, was an abiding optimism, an unshakable belief in us and in our ability to solve problems and to defeat threats and to fix what's broken.

Gillette did not simply arrive. He burst forth exuberantly, a whirlwind of problem-solving energy and optimistic good cheer, possessed with the remarkable ability to find joy in the most mundane of military tasks, performed to serve a higher purpose: the preservation of our freedoms. Doubt as to what he was defending never plagued him.

There was nothing cynical about the America John Gillette saw. We were not a nation that, as Sulzberger cast it, fights misbegotten wars, withholds fundamental human rights or counts oil as basis for American policy.

We were, and are, a nation of honorable and decent people who rise, as Gillette did and as the men and women in Iraq and Afghanistan have, to the duty freedom requires.

Gillette gave 51 years. Had his nation asked, it would have been more.

•Jim Wooten is associate editorial page editor. His column runs Sundays, Tuesdays and Fridays.

[ClaireSolt]

The NY Times has betrayed its trust to provide objective news we could trust.