By Rabbi David Eidensohn
In
1892, Francis Bellamy wrote the pledge of allegiance as: "I pledge allegiance to my flag and to the
republic for which it stands: one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice
for all." The pledge, after updates in 1923, 1924 and 1954, is now:
"I pledge allegiance to the Flag of
the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one
Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” The words
"under G-d" were added in 1954. How strange that America saw fit to add
"under G-d" not in 1892 when the pledge was written, but sixty years
later, in modern times, in a world racing towards secularism.
In the fifties we feared
the Communists and their successes. Sputnik, the world's first space vehicle,
was launched by the Soviet Union in 1957. Stalin's success stealing countries, fomenting
revolutions, and spreading Communism everywhere, made us wonder and worry. We
wondered how far the Soviet juggernaut would go, and we worried why the world
did not protest a ferocious mass-murderer. Stalin killed tens of millions of
peasants, many religious people, and then "purified the revolution"
by slaughtering Communists, for no reason understood by normal people. Western
intellectuals did not challenge Stalin. They often encouraged him and hated
America.
Russia, one sixth of
the earth's landmass, was Communist. China, with the world's largest
population, had gone Communist in 1947. Eastern Europe was firmly in Stalin's
grip. Everywhere, Communists were spreading their teachings, fomenting
radicalism, and threatening democracy. The left was sure that America would
collapse soon, and my generation was not sure they were wrong. There was much
talk about nuclear war. Russia tested its first atom bomb in 1949. In February
of 1954, America exploded the first hydrogen bomb.
War was fresh in people's minds. As soon as
World War II ended in 1945, the war with Communism began. At first, it was a
war without American troops, until Korea. The Korean War began in 1950 and stopped,
without being resolved, in 1953. Many Americans died, and great turmoil
resulted from Truman's dismissal of General MacArthur, who felt that Communist
China must be badly beaten. America, just a few years earlier, was a triumphant
colossus striding the world, having defeated the Axis powers decisively. Now,
in 1954, it played push-pull with a determined and undefeated Communist world
movement. Did we still hope for a future denied us by the intellectuals? Did we
have the stamina to battle half a world of determined adversaries, riding to
triumph after triumph? Many saw capitalism as a dying anachronism, and
Communism as the wave of the Future. Trouble followed trouble. The Korean War
stopped, in 1953, and the Communist Chinese, in 1954, began to threaten
Nationalist China.
In such a time of worry and fear, the words
"under G-d" were added to the Pledge of Allegiance. For the first
time since we became a nation, there was no clear way out of our problems. The
Revolutionary War was a leap of a faith based upon the reality that Britain had
to supply an army from thousands of miles away, and could eventually be worn
down by a growing group of colonies. In 1954, a nuclear armed Communism,
suffused with infinite energy, backed by our own intellectuals, colleges and to
a degree, culture, was a much greater problem. No solution was in sight.
During the heady days of Communism, a young
rabbi, Rabbi Joseph Kahaneman, came to the saint of the generation, Rabbi
Israel Kagan. "What can I do?" he asked. "The Communists and
secularists have the power, and they demand that I, as rabbi of the community,
participate in their program, or they will turn against me."
Rabbi Kagan replied: "When there is a
Civil War, and each side demands of us, 'Are you with us or against us,' what
do we do? We must join the strongest faction.'"
"What do you mean?" asked Rabbi
Kahaneman. "Should I become a secularist?"
"G-d is the strongest," said Rabbi
Kagan. "Join His side."
When these words were said, everybody predicted
that Orthodox Judaism was in such a decline that the future would see its
speedy demise. The Holocaust saw the sudden disappearance of an entire Orthodox
culture, and a small remnant of survivors were all that remained, scattered
here and there. When I entered Yeshiva in the fifties and wore a yarmulka head
covering, people were shocked. They feared for me. Adults berated me, and when
that didn't do any good, they went after my parents, even my grandmother.
Religion, in those days, was honored at funerals and weddings, with very little
else.
In 1954, our leaders saw the travail of a
country slipping from greatness into the darkness of demise. They invoked G-d
and revealed a nation's soul. In one generation, historically a lightning
flash, the world vomited its mightiest political and spiritual force, Soviet
Communism, and embraced religion as it had not in centuries. Sovietologist
George Kennan pronounced the fall of Russian Communism "a miracle."
He was right. In one generation, the parents who had torn into me were sending
their children to Yeshiva. It was better than sending them to the secular
culture to learn about sex and drugs.
The world trembled when an ascendant Russian
premier, Nikita Khrushchev, took off his shoe while speaking at the podium of
the United Nations and declared, "We will bury you." That is the way
things were going in the fifties. G-d had different ideas. In 1956, this same Mr.
Khrushchev shocked the world another time, by declaring that Stalin was evil.
Slowly things changed. Communist Russia reached a point whereby it could only
produce one new hypodermic needle per hospital. A new leader, Mikhail Gorbachev,
brought to Russia the fanciest red American sports cars, and pointed Russia to capitalism,
the West, and a new day. The heavens opened and answered our prayers.
Religion is prospering, and secularism is
struggling. Nobody will ever yell at my children for being religious. My
children have no idea what a secular culture is, except that it is somewhere
between Mars and hell.
Today, the old enemies
have vanished. Communism is dead, kept alive only on college campuses by
radical professors. There are new enemies, and when we recite the pledge, we
have renewed hope that all Evil will perish. Today, as in 1954, we don't know
how to solve our problems. This doesn't bother us, in particular. We are a
mighty nation, and, "under G-d," we will conquer our adversaries and
solve our difficulties. What needs to be solved?
In a way, our present
problems are worse than any problems we ever had. I don't refer to terrorism. I
am talking about the dysfunction of our primary social structures. Our problems
today are produced by the system itself.
Our country has three
pillars: family, business and government. All three of these are in serious
problems, in ways never seen before in our history. Family is destroying itself
because parents raise boys to be non-men and girls to be non-women. Family is
destroying itself because parents send their children to public schools that
teach tiny tots about homosexuality. Family is destroying itself because women
must work and cannot be women, men and mothers. Families with a fifty percent
divorce rate are a problem, especially for the children damaged by living in
such homes. Increasingly, Americans refuse to marry, don't want children, or
pursue careers until fertility is finished. The homosexual agenda has seized
ABC television, which has no family episodes in the traditional venue. Every
mother who turns on the television damages the child. The system is turned
against children, and what future do we have?
The next pillar of
America is business. Does anyone believe in business anymore? The headlines
blare the words "infectious greed," the new phrase coined by Fed
Chair Alan Greenspan, about the chief executives of our most famous and largest
companies. In the Washington Post, Kurtz wrote that even the major newspapers,
whose editorials protest certain corporate accounting tricks, engage in these
very tricks in their business. The Times explained that the editorial board and
the business department are separate.
The Gallup Poll of July
12, 2002, in an article entitled More Americans Now View Big Business as a
Threat, by Jeffrey M. Jones, showed "a sharp increase in the percentage
who view big business as more of a threat to the nation than big labor or big
government." The increase was, from October 2,00 to the present (July 5,
2002), up to 38% from 22%. This is about a 70% increase in less than two years.
The Gallup Poll revealed that 70% of Americans believe that the business world
is corrupt.
What the poll did not
reveal is that big business is a problem for other reasons. It downsizes as
much as possible, destroying the livelihoods and lives of countless Americans.
It goes to China to use slave labor to avoid paying Americans decent salaries.
Can America survive with Big Business? I recently met a man selling insurance.
He had a degree in physics and chemistry and worked for years in computers.
When he turned fifty the companies dropped him. They don't want to be
responsible for old people.
Business must reward,
not the cleverest accountant, but hard work and talent. American business does
neither. The system of American business is destructive; we cannot thrive with
it, only suffer until it flings us out.
The third pillar of
America is government. Government is there to help people in their lives. It
protects us in time of war, and provides needed services, such as making laws
and protecting the peace. It may venture into other areas, as it did with Social
Security and the Post Office, to help people. Today, government is an unwieldy
monster controlled by politicians. It makes laws to protect minorities that
terrorize the majority. It does just the opposite of what is good for the
people. For instance, our government, even under a conservative Republican,
promotes the gay lobby stance in the Federal Center for Disease Control that
money for new cures must go first and foremost for gay diseases, like AIDS, and
not cancer, heart disease and diabetes. The governments in New York State and
in other Gay Lobby states refuse to list AIDS and HIV on the official
infectious diseases list. This way, gays can infect as many people as they want
and the health officials are helpless. Government forces the people to abide
the huge costs and diseases spread by homosexuals, and when our health system
breaks down so that tens of millions of working Americans have no health
insurance, government doesn't care.
Government, in just recent
decades, has suddenly become a mortal threat to the economy. One in seven
Americans work for local and state governments. It is impossible for six people
to pay a seventh a salary, an office, a budget, and a building. What of the
federal government? It earns 1.2 trillion and spends 2 trillion. It owes 6
trillion and has contingency debts for Social Security of ten trillion. It pays
almost .4 trillion dollars a year just on interest! The debt grows, and
spending increases. The states are collapsing; they cannot afford health care,
so old and poor people just die.
The government spends
incredible sums but has no working financial formula. In the Washington Post,
July 17, 2002, David Broder interviews the head of the White House Office of
Management and Budget. Mr. Mitchell Daniels says that the government is awash
in deficits that should not be there by traditional economic indicators. The
old rule of thumb, says Mr. Daniels, projects 28 billion dollars of government
earnings for each rise of one percent in the gross domestic product. The first
quarter of 2002 registered a gross domestic product increase of six percent.
2002 should thus see a government income raised by 6 x 28 = 168 billion dollars.
Instead, Mr. Daniels says, the government not only does not have additional
income, it has a deficit of 124 billion dollars, or six percent, from 2001.
Let us play that again.
The economy is rising at a rate that should bring the government 168 billion
dollars, but instead, it projects a loss for 2002 of 124 billion. The economy
is rising by 6 percent and government income is falling by six percent! In
other words, government income is the inverse of the economy. The economy goes
up by the amount the government goes down. Is this not frightening? Put another
way: the government is 292 billion dollars off of the amount that our economic
formulas, created by decades of reliable experience, project. We are going into
a new dimension with government earnings, and the direction is down.
Mr. Broder tells us
that the government is now linked to the stock market, and when the stock
market takes a plunge, the government is taken for the ride.
The government that
threw away 1.3 trillion dollars last year now has no idea how to keep its
economic engine running. All of this happened so quickly. The system of
government itself, spending not wisely but by political program, borrowing
trillions and losing billions, is taking us we don't know where. The system is
sick. The problem is endogenous and innate, not external. Government, if
allowed to keep borrowing and spending trillions more than we have, and
spending what it has on the wrong things, such as building hugely expensive
programs to teach gays how to have safe homosexual sex instead of cancer
research, will destroy us.
Despite this and the
talk of terror, our prayers will light our way and we will prevail. We pledge
it.