My changing world: wise to be optimistic

For Christmas my daughters gave me a jigsaw puzzle of the front page of The New York Times on the date of the famous “I Have a Dream” March on Washington (Aug. 28, 1963). I was proud of having gone on the march as a white person and proud of the subsequent Civil Rights Act of 1965, which I feel transformed our nation in great ways.

Aside from the advancements in civil rights, I have for a while felt pessimistic about the country. I see its economic base eroded by the sending of manufacturing abroad, by an unfavorable balance of trade and by a shift from solid wealth production focused on food, housing, transportation and other essential needs to a focus on more house-of-cards concerns like leisure, law, insurance, advertising, marketing and the sale of items craved but not needed.

Vital economic activities, especially education and health care, I see as widely resented because they are expensive. I see extreme commercial values affecting our “culture,” and I see our entertainment as not designed for thoughtful adults.

But after I finished the puzzle, I read the whole of that page of The Times and it made me reassess my pessimism. Things today may not be worse than they were then; in fact they may be better.

There were two stories about railroad strikes, two articles about the Vietnam War, articles about the election of an avid segregationist in Mississippi, about Republicans’ and liberals’ simultaneously attacking then Gov. Rockefeller of New York, about sharp increases in the Consumer Price Index, about corrupt construction practices in the World’s Fair road material and about a mine blast at a Utah potash pit that trapped 25.

I felt proud of that moment in 1963 and proud of the United States and the progress it has made and is making in addressing social concerns. I have lived through incredible changes in technology, transportation, communications, space flight and medicine (no wonder medical care is so costly!).

We as a people have come so far and done so much that despite the current recession, the threatening debt crisis, seemingly endless wars and the festering acrimony, it seems wise to be optimistic and hopeful that we can somehow slog through and do it again.

Harry Hall is a longtime resident of Sharon.