This evening’s NBC News broadcast with Brian Williams had a beautiful piece about Sargent Shriver who epitomized the liberal ideal through good works for the people of this country. He did so through public service as head of the Peace Corps and the head of President Johnson's War On Poverty program. They included a recording of President Johnson on the phone trying to talk a reluctant Shriver into taking his war on poverty post. What struck me most about the phone call was the President telling Shriver in a most insistent tone "I want to get rid of poverty in this country." Let’s imagine for a moment, if you could, a concerted government effort to rid our nation of poverty in today’s tea party world where the "I've got mine" dynamic rules at the expense of those that certainly don't have theirs either through circumstance or the extension of public policies aligned against their economic interest.
That's the most enduring lost of Mr. Shriver and what he represented. A compassion for people in a can do world when we as Americans felt we could do anything we put our minds to. Instead we now have a group of people imagining themselves as "Tea Party Patriots" who have no conception of what those original rebels were about. The Gadsden flag they have co-opted with the slogan "Don't Tread On Me" speaks to them about what they consider an oppressive government standing in the way of a litany of freedoms force feed to them by a conservative movement through their like minded media outlets. The flag was originally conceived as an answer to King George's non representative monarchy and his oppression of the colonists with laws and regulations without legitimate representation. The problem with their view is we now have a representative government brilliantly conceived by our founding fathers. A further problem is they feel within the confines of a representative government they are oppressed by public policy initiatives they disagree with. That's not what General Gadsden had in mind when he conceived of his famous flag. Representative government means living with the consensus of the majority and working within the framework of that representative government to initiate the change they want.
We owe a debt to Sargent Shriver and the service to his country. I just wish we all felt that way. Especially his daughter, Maria Shriver, wife of former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Her enabling and linking hands with elements of the GOP through her husband stand in stark opposition and contrast to everything her father stood for and for me its very troubling for the Kennedy legacy. But that is for another diary/post on another day. In any event I wanted to take this day and honor Mr. Shriver and hope there are many more like him that will be inspired by his public service and follow in his footsteps.