TheMillerCircle.org

I am a university Professor of Neuroscience, with a narrow focus of research into nerve cell function of the vertebrate retina, and a broad interest in the issues that bind us through a set of common aspirations, generated by a sense of shared humanity. I am deeply concerned that the issues under which we should strongly coalesce, in support of a simple set of objectives, like the protection of our environment, reduction of greenhouse gases, protecting endangered species, reducing deforestation, providing health care for our citizens and reducing to the point of elimination all nuclear military arsenals….these issues, and the reasons why we must do something about them, have been so distorted by the political process in America, namely through the shameful practices and ideology of the corrupt Republican Party, that we must now question whether the United States can or should continue as the leader of the Western World. Surely someone else can do a better job. We have badly defaulted on our leadership commitments and tend to view every international problem as a military threat, or one that can be resolved by military means. Many of us in this country now painfully share this tragic view of our own nation that we once thought stood for purpose and high integrity and most of all for peaceful solutions to problems.

With the election of Barack Obama in the fall of 2008, perhaps we finally have the leadership that can help restore our national purpose to one of solving major problems rather than being focused on the acquisition of wealth and protecting our interests solely through a military posture. But, due in large part to the failures of the Bush administration and the mythical  “free-market” economic system that has collapsed all around us, the problems our new president faces seem overwhelming and hopelessly complex. The American public sat by and watched three decades of Republican leadership produce what Noam Chomsky has described as “a failed state.”  America’s most famous journalist, I.F. Stone characterized the Reagan administration when he first grasped its intentions as a movement based on “class greed.” And, since Reagan, things have only gotten worse.

Many Americans have gone through a period of double shock in the past eight years. We were shocked at first by the horrific events of 9/11, but since then we have been exposed to a series of un-American responses by our own government that force us into a state of denial and shame and culminated in a more profound state of shock about the nation that we thought we knew, but which has seemed so repulsive to us, because of the almost daily litany of new revelations about the  behavior of our own government. Shortly after GW Bush was elected, and 9/11 hit,  I thought it would take years to get the country back that we had just before the 2000 election. But Bush put such a dismal face on our executive administration, and placed such huge restraints on what we can do to set our ship on a better course, that I now believe it will take decades to repair the damage he has done, both domestically and abroad and I am quite certain we will never recover the scientific leadership we have lost in areas like stem cell research and environmental technology.

As a nation, we no longer know our own history and we seem unable to accept the direct outcome of our own actions. The attack on 9/11 was, to use the CIA’s own terminology, a “blowback” attack on us. We created the hostilities that led to this attack and unless we recognize our responsibilities in producing these kinds of events, such as the beginning and aftermath of  “Charlie Wilson’s War”, the failure to force Israel into a peace settlement with the Palestinians and our occupation of sacred Islamic holy sites, the likelihood that we can do something long-lasting about them will forever be out of reach. Bombing countries back to the stone age as we did in Iraq and seem to be doing more intensely in Afghanistan and Pakistan, create more uncertainty for our own future, more public debt and more spending on military needs to defend us against these new threats, which we hype to the point of creating massive, fictive armies in response to a few thousand radical, pissed off fundamentalists. Never has a country so large been threatened by so few, but so incapable of grasping the reasons for the antagonism.  Of equal importance and perhaps more critical to us as a country is the fact that these kinds of actions badly divide us amongst ourselves, something we should strive hard to avoid by developing a consensus on our strategies and, if necessary, educate the country on why we need to take actions that may seem outside of our national character. A very, very long time ago, most of us thought of ourselves as members of a peaceful nation.

We are on a course that seems designed to best serve the interests of our military-industrial complex. Our economy is based on military Keynesianism and we fear the debate that might reveal the magnitude of our economic militarism.  Our continued preoccupation with  military strategies and weapons development will postpone our ability to focus on the long-term solutions needed to address our real problems. We need the kind of national intelligence that has been outlawed by the Republican Party–a longitudinal view of our future. Imagine in the face of stiff challenges to our future, we have one of the two major parties pushing, as their issues of great substance, homosexuality, gun control and abortion as the nation’s most pressing problems. While the last election seemed to dim the future political prospects of those who advocate these issues as political ideology, a large sector of our electorate do not understand that they have been manipulated into a frenzy on these matters by their Republican masters, whose mentor seems to come from the words of Herman Goering, when he described the value of fear in getting public support “All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.”

Recent polling data published in Science Magazine evolution-poll.pdf has revealed the shocking truth about the sad state of scientific knowledge and understanding that exists in our country today. The question was asked if “Human beings, as we know them, developed from earlier species of animals?”; those interviewed were asked to respond with true or false. The United States of America, home of the best research universities in the world, finished second to last among more than thirty nations polled: only Turkey finished behind us. Furthermore, these numbers have been getting worse in this country as the religious fundamentalist movement has become more dominant. A recipe for certain disaster is in our future if we don’t recognize the meaning of these polls and get alarmed about the future of our country, especially as these attitudes begin to encroach upon our way of life, including the fate of our educational and research institutions. Already we have placed our scientific future at grave risk by the encroachment of religious fundamentalism into our national funding policies, such as stem cell research and global climate change. Obama has set the processes in motion to reverse these policies, but weeding out those in government who want to run things the way they were before he took office means that he cannot simply turn on a switch and provide the fixes that our country really needs.

We can already see the impact of our research neglect as new progress in these important scientific areas increasingly comes from other countries: our leadership in science has never been more threatened than it is today. This seems doubly tragic because it’s about the only thing we have left as a future economic engine, having given up on manufacturing, and now existing as a country where the financial service sector is the top dog, or at least it was until the middle of 2008. The kind of economy we will have for the next fifty years is being decided right now and the attempts to create a more progressive country seem to be coming up short.

I am not just talking about science. The dumbing down of our entire culture has reached art, literature and the entire spectrum of the humanities. The American value system has eroded, partially fed by false news and empy rhetoric or the terminal sound bite. Political power is one thing to put in Washington, but political leadership in cultural values is an American disaster. There seems to be little sense that we have a common culture or set of aspirations or even curiosity about things, except what comes through our television sets. A popular television show is valued more highly than a good book. We need Oprah Winfrey to tell us what to read. We have a mass culture that feeds on short-term fads and the alternative achievements such as writing well or developing new knowledge of the world is irrelevant for the pop culture of today. Our publishing industry has focused on profit, not quality, book sales, not development of authors and easy topics, not the tough ones. Yet this confoundedly naive aptitude that seems to be flourishing in America, an unwillingness to face our past with some degree of objectivity, is the very element that allows us to plunder abroad while Americans believe we are doing good in the world. GWB was not the cause of our problems more than he was an indicator of how far we have gone down a road that may be difficult from which to return. At long last, we have a new President who seems willing to help set a new course for the country. But, we need to let him know that we the public have a pretty good idea of what the new course should look like and we need to help him trim the sails as he tries to get there. He is a good man, but he can’t change America all by himself.  He needs to hear from us now more than ever.

The election of 2008 has brought a windstorm of mental relief from the eight years of tension and anxiety we developed under the Bush administration. At last, we have a President, Barack Obama, who has already reversed some of the odious decisions and rules made under the Bush administration: he has promised to eliminate torture and close down the prison at Guantanamo, Cuba. Despite the refreshing candor and promises of this new administration, the disastrous economic collapse that has put our future in a cloud of uncertainty, raises issues about how much can be done to fix a country that seems, the closer we look at it, to be very badly broken and misaligned. Obama is faced with a multifaceted burden, perhaps more so than that faced by any other President, with the possible exception of Abraham Lincoln. Our economy is tattered, our international reputation has been badly mauled and our ability to address our own country’s problems remains highly politicized and polarized by an out-of-date Republican party that has yet to understand how and why they have done so much damage to the country and our economy. I hope they have further lessons to be learned at their own polling places in the next election. We need them to become irrelevant in future decision-making.

Obama has a lot to fix. America has gone into a free-fall in its international prestige and the vitality of its leadership, on top of which we have a failing economy, the dimensions of which seem to grow each day.  There is almost no aspect of our government that was undamaged by the Bush administration, including support for eduction, science and our technological leadership. Indeed, the Federal government that once supported the growth of science, was, under Bush, in open denial of scientific findings and conclusions. While one aspect of Obama’s stimulus package recently passed, we still don’t know the long-term future of our national scientific investment and how far this administration is willing to go to repair the damage done to our scientific momentum. The scientific spigot got so effectively turned off during the GW Bush administration, that restoring the scientific leadership we once had is probably not possible.

As toxic as the Republican Party has been to our society, it has not gone away, though gratefully, it has gotten smaller and hopefully this recent size reduction is a prelude to its imminent elimination, at least in its present form.

The choice for our future is clear. We are smart enough and experienced enough to know what to do. We should also know by now that our future and that of our children is intimately related to how successfully we can manage our environment–the global environment. The Republican Party has put us into a deep state of debt and a kind of moral implosion that seemed to culminate in our financial collapse. Getting out of this hole and recovering and sustaining what we once had will be, perhaps, the single most challenging task we have faced since the end of WW II. I urge you to read about the solution we adopted to address the new responsibilities we faced after WW II and especially after Sputnik. Strip out the anti-communist posturing which led to the Cold War and proved to be such an unnecessary disaster for us and for the Soviets and then concentrate on how our investment in education, the GI Bill, the reaction to Sputnik (with the expansion of research universities and the establishment of America as a center of science), were the most important elements to our economic recovery and can be once again for the recovery we have to go through now by building and repairing our economy. The long-term prosperity that we generated in the years after WW II is gone. We need to discover a new America and embellish those parameters of our life that we know have worked in the past. To restore better balance to the Middle Class, we need to improve worker representation in unions and stop the illegal actions of companies that penalize union organizers. We need to eliminate leverage buyouts and force sanity on Wall Street. We need to force the financial sector to stop robbing from the real economy and start doing what they are supposed to do–serve it!  The lost tablets of our past success need to be rediscovered. And by the way, one of the reforms so badly needed in this country is that of a more enlightened press and a more effective public broadcasting system. These are public airways and those that lease them  should be held to higher journalistic standards, not the dumbing down of news and redefining what constitutes journalism. Hate radio is not free speech. Our media need to stop removing the war from the front pages and recognize the destruction we have brought to a country that had nothing to do with 9/11. Wake up America! What can you do to help?

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