National Priorities: We Get What We Pay For

Some of you may remember the late-1980s PBS series Ethics in America. A distinguished moderator led a discussion by a panel of accomplished Americans on issues ranging from personal ethics, to medical ethics, to ethics in government, and everything in between. It was a brilliant group of programs, and I was always left with several things to think about after I watched it.
One of the brilliant moderators was Professor Charles Ogletree of Harvard University. He was a career academic, now retired, but his thinking was crystal clear for communicating with lay people, his questions invariably penetrating, his positions typically unassailable. I always enjoyed the shows that he led. I also enjoyed the times he made the members of the panel squirm a little bit. People like Newt Gingrich, Rudolph Giuliani, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, and Antonin Scalia, among many others. People who didn't normally have to squirm very much. Good for the soul, don't you know.
The next time I heard of Professor Ogletree was during the first presidential campaign of Barack Obama. Ogletree taught law to both the future president and the future first lady. No wonder they were each such effective attorneys.
I've seen Mr. Ogletree's name again tonight. The Cambridge, MA, police have issued a bulletin asking for the public's assistance. Professor Ogletree is now an Alzheimer's patient, and wandered away from his home tonight about 5:30.
It breaks my heart to learn that this man, who enjoyed such a formidable intellect throughout his life, is struggling with this dread disease. It scares me whenever I hear that a person with Alzheimer's has wandered away from home.
And I wonder how much farther down the road toward a cure or prevention we might be if we hadn't spent trillions of dollars fighting ultimately meaningless, pointless wars since the time Professor Ogletree was moderating those wondrous episodes of Ethics in America.
We owe better to a lost, confused man in Cambridge, Massachusetts, tonight. And a great many other Americans, too. Americans who are ill, hungry, homeless, unloved, and uncared for.

NOTE: Professor Ogletree was found, safe, and returned to his home about midnight tonight.

Warm Springs, Georgia, April 12, 1945: 74 Years Ago Today

I hold that Abraham Lincoln was the greatest American president, for reasons that I assume to be obvious. I place George Washington second, because he had to take what the Constitution listed as his responsibilities, and put them into effect out of nothing. No precedent. No tradition. Just how his vision for America led him to set things up. 
Franklin Delano Roosevelt comes third on my list. He inherited the Great Depression from a republican who believed that the thing would eventually just work itself out. Hoover did nothing.
Nothing.
FDR, basically, did everything. He tried. If it worked, he kept it. If it didn't, he ditched that, and tried something else. He held the country together, did all he could to put it back to work, and worked to keep America's spirits up through one of lowest times we'd ever known.
Then, on the heels of the Depression, we landed squarely in the middle of World War II. He supported Great Britain. He inspired us to rise from Pearl Harbor. He fixed the vision. He led the fight.
But he didn't live to see the victory.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt died 74 years ago today, in Warm Springs, Georgia, his retreat that renewed him throughout his years of struggle against the effects of the polio that robbed him of the use of his legs, six weeks before the war ended in Europe; four months before the war ended in Asia. But he had agreed to put on his fourth ticket a man, plain, plainspoken, simple, and direct, to lead the nation through to the end of the war in both theaters: Harry Truman.
We would not be the nation that we are today, the one whose institutions fascists are still working to destroy, had it not been for the strength, intelligence, persistence, hope, expectation, and sunny disposition, always believing in the future of America, that comprised Franklin Roosevelt.
We are a fortunate people that there was such a leader at such a time. We will remain profoundly indebted to him, just as to Lincoln and Washington, as long as this country endures.