Last weekend’s no-show by the Y2K bug wasn’t the first time a millennium scare fizzled out. Indeed, we ought to look at how our ancestors reacted when the year 1000 came and went without disaster.
They had approached the milestone with escalating trepidation, Christian prophecy saying it would mark the world’s end. Even the high and mighty were fearful. German Emperor Otto III spent New Year’s Eve in prayer and fasting.
One witness, monastic chronicler Ralph Glaber, reports that when the millennium arrived and his contemporaries found the earth still firmly under foot, their attention quickly returned to problems deferred while awaiting the Apocalypse. They undertook a massive building program, replacing wooden churches with ones of stone, as if convinced they were going to be around for a while, their handiwork longer still.
“It was as though the very world had shaken herself and cast off her old age,” Glaber wrote, “and were clothing herself everywhere in a white robe of churches.”
Now that our computers haven’t crashed and the heat and lights are still on, shouldn’t we follow their lead, shaking ourselves and casting off our inertia? We have an awful lot of problems, far too long put on hold. Even a fraction of the hundreds of billions spent on the Y2K scare would go a long way toward solving them. Especially if we were to tackle our problems with anything like the burst of creative energy our forebears woke up with on Jan. 1, 1000.
The people of the Middle Ages loved going on pilgrimage, thinking of the journey as an opportunity for reflection. So let’s take an armchair tour of some places that ought to give us pause as we contemplate where our society is heading.
– Roll up tight the windows of our imaginary car and mentally drive through the mean streets of an inner-city neighborhood. Take a good look with your mind’s eye at the burned-out buildings and broken lives. Note well the young men standing at the street corners selling drugs, the old men passing a bottle. Now ask yourself: How have we allowed such things to exist, right smack in the middle of the richest society that has ever been?
My daughter teaches 1st grade in an inner-city public school with a breakfast program and a free lunch too. For many of her students, those are the only meals of which they can be sure.
I’d bet the difference between kids who get taken care of and those who don’t correlates with how their ancestors got to this country. Two million Africans were brought to America in chains. Think about the generation after generation of human misery that number represents.
Actually, we do, at least formally. February is designated as black history month. But we get amnesia about black history when whizzing past the nation’s ghettos on a nearby expressway.
In our nation’s capital there’s a memorial to the Holocaust, an almost unthinkable tragedy and, as it happens, one that struck my people. But that human disaster occurred someplace else. Why don’t we build a living museum to America’s racial tragedy by extending a more effective hand to those still trapped in slavery’s legacy?
One problem is we don’t know how. The liberal prescription of throwing money at the ghetto didn’t work. Nor has the conservative tough-love formula. That means we need to try a third way, maybe more.
Those who lived through the first millennium scare did just that. They wanted their new stone cathedrals to soar heavenward, but with their rudimentary engineering, many came crashing down, some several times. That only inspired the medievals to keep on trying until they got it right. They felt they owed the effort to God. They realized that our time on Earth is limited, so it’s a sin to waste it.
– Next, let’s ride through America’s Rust Belt cities and towns. Stop off at the greasy spoons and taverns where middle-age men and women stare into a coffee cup or nurse a drink, their working days prematurely ended. Many had followed in the foot steps of parents and grandparents who built America’s industrial might.
Their sweat and labor no longer needed, their idle hours are the side effect of today’s fast-changing, red-hot economy. The jobs they once held were moved overseas by multinational corporations. The steel mills and petroleum plants that stayed behind have gone high-tech, needing fewer hands to run them. Northwest Indiana, where industrial plant after industrial plant line Lake Michigan’s shore, used to be known as a place where anyone willing to work would never want for a job. In recent years, the area has lost more than 50,000 manufacturing jobs, a story repeated in every mill town in America.
Our political leaders, whatever their party label, urge patience, explaining that times of change always bring temporary dislocations. But patently those dislocations are felt differently in the executive suite and on the assembly line. There are no golden parachutes for blue-collar workers.
The wonder of America has been the bulging midsection of its demography. Historically, most societies take the form of a pyramid. There are a few lucky ones at the top, a great mass of poor people at the base, and a small middle class in between. In this country, though, the middle class swelled to unprecedented proportions, fatted by the handsome paychecks the inhabitants of Rust Belt America once brought home.
More recently, the middle class has been dividing in two. Its upper ranks have never had it so good, what with the Dow Jones industrial average reaching ever-more astronomical heights. But on its lower level, the middle class has been confronted by a less happy statistic: Median family income has been declining in America.
Academic economists and editorial writers say nothing can be done about this. A free market is bound to make some of us winners, others losers, they say. Prosperity depends upon the government keeping hands off the economy.
But if there is no more to political life than that, let’s at least be honest about it and rename this country the United States of Merrill Lynch. In fact, our Constitution was intended to be something more than a stock-market offering. That’s why its preamble says that our government was established to “promote the general welfare.”
Capitalism is a great system for creating wealth. But it also creates escalating inequalities of wealth. Two decades ago, the head of an average American corporation made 42 times as much as the average worker. Today, those CEOs make 419 times as much as the men and women on the shop floor.
Isn’t it time we divided up the pie a bit more equitably? Don’t listen to those who say we don’t know how to. They said that when Social Security was proposed, 60 years ago, and earlier still when child-labor laws were debated.
A century after the first millennium, the people of Western Europe thought it time to retake the Holy Land for Christendom. One hundred thousand of them set out on crusade, scarcely knowing where Jerusalem was. One thing they did know, though, as they kept shouting along the way: “God wills it!”
If we don’t think the Almighty wants all his children to share in our nation’s prosperity, maybe the time has come to close the doors of our churches, synagogues and mosques.
– Finally, let’s park our imaginary car on a university campus and peek into the science labs. You’ll see the colorful costumes of students who have come the world over to study the marvels of American technology. That’s great for them, not so good for us. We import science students not as an act of charity but because we don’t have enough qualified high school graduates to keep our university laboratories going. Half of all students of science and technology in this country are foreign-born.
Even they aren’t enough to sustain our new, high-tech economy. Every year American business leaders pressure Congress to increase the number of H-1B visas for immigrants with special skills. Without the tens of thousands of them the Immigration and Naturalization Service moves to the head of the line every year, Silicon Valley might well become a low-tech ghost town.
Keep in mind, we’re talking about America, the land of Edison, the nation that put a man on the moon. What happened? America’s schools essentially stopped teaching science, and pretty much a lot of other subjects too.
Numbers don’t lie. Today high school students score 35 points lower on the SAT, the leading test of academic skills, than their predecessors did 30 years ago.
Educators and pundits try to explain away such depressing statistics by arguing that the SAT is only an imperfect measure of a student’s ability. But if our kids do have some special talents that aren’t being picked up by the widely used college admission test, then why can’t they get into our universities’ science and technology programs?
The high point of this low comedy effort to avoid the obvious came a few years back when the folks who administer the SATs simply recalibrated the test to automatically inflate grades. With a stroke of the pen, our students seemed to get smarter.
Sometime between when I was a student 50 years ago and now, American educators redefined their mission and rigor got lost in the shuffle. Filling kids’ minds with the Three R’s became less important than educating the “whole student.” Teachers colleges taught a new generation of teachers to worry less about the lessons on the blackboard than about creating a “positive atmosphere” in the classroom.
America’s schools were celebrated for encouraging students’ creativity, while those of other nations, say, Japan, were put down for their rigid conformity. Yet the number of Japanese students in our university science programs was increasing even as the ranks of Americans was dropping.
Maybe America’s students need a little help in linking self-esteem to real academic accomplishment. A good starting point would be to reintroduce rigor into the vocabulary of the professional educator.
We’re told that America’s economic salvation in an age of globalization is our high-tech industries. But that’s going to prove a mirage without an educated labor force to staff it.
On the morrow of the first millennium, the educational level of Western Europe was rock bottom. If you could do long division, you were thought a genius–or, an emissary of the devil. Yet by putting their minds to it, the medievals so quickly raised educational standards that within a century and a half, they’d invented a whole new form: the university, which was subsequently imitated the world over.
Our educational task is easier than that which the people of 1000 confronted. They had no model to follow. We do. All we need do is to restore our schools to the goals and values they once held.
