There once were summertimes when the living was easy, as the song from the Broadway musical “Porgy and Bess” melodically reminds us. But not this summer, not with COVID-19 still spreading dangerously across the land and uncertainty over what happens next after the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan.
Before the entire world became glued to the internet, social media and summer TV re-runs, many people took the time over the summer months to read books and catch up on things they thought they didn’t have time for the other nine months of the year.
Still, despite this summer’s flood of “breaking news,” I took time to rediscover a classic book by the English journalist Paul Johnson. It’s titled “Modern Times,” and it’s more than just a history of the world from the 1920s to the 1980s. It’s a chronicle of what can happen to a people and their leaders who deliberately ignore history and thus doom themselves to repeat it.
In his chapter on the rise of Hitler in Germany, Johnson writes with profound implications for our day, which many Germans rejected: “The Western liberal notion of freedom of choice and private provision based on high wages (preferring) the paternalistic alternative of compulsory and universal security. The state was nursemaid as well as sergeant-major. It was a towering shadow over the lives of ordinary people and their relationship toward it was one of dependency and docility.”
With America’s deepening debt and a Democratic president and Democratic Congress desiring to spend more, can it be denied that Americans are increasingly relying on government to take care of them, rather than the once universal value of self-reliance with government as a last resort, not a first resource?