Essay: POLITICS & ASSASSINATION

(3 of 3)

Not that Americans want a police-state climate. It would hardly improve democracy; nor should the U.S. ironically honor Robert Kennedy by choosing fear over faith in people. Instead, the chief hope for excising the canker of political assassination is that a far more temperate political dialogue can somehow replace the incendiary language of anger, bigotry and vituperation—that millions of individual American citizens may now realize that freedom basically depends on persuading rather than provoking.

This, in turn, would require sluggish bureaucracies to respond more rapidly to social needs. John W. Gardner put it best at Cornell's commencement earlier this month, when he imagined himself as a 23rd century thinker. He had discovered, he said, that "20th century institutions were caught in a savage crossfire between uncritical lovers and unloving critics. On the one side, those who loved their institutions tended to smother them in an embrace of death, loving their rigidities more than their promise, shielding them from life-giving criticism. On the other side, there arose a breed of critics without love, skilled in demolition but untutored in the arts by which human institutions are nurtured and strengthened and made to flourish. Between the two, the institutions perished."

Gardner's dire diagnosis may or may not be overstated. What is beyond dispute is that all too many of the nation's most creative leaders are perishing, and that the trend must be checked by a national restoration of reason rather than emotion.