For the past several weeks, I've wanted to share with readers my encounter with a World War II veteran that took place in the parking lot at Shaw's Market on Railroad Ave. earlier this summer. But, like a tornado stuck over the city, the firestorm touched off by Gloucester's teen pregnancy rate just wouldn't go away.
Then came the back breaker: the cruel, indefensible public humiliation of Gloucester High School principal Dr. Joseph Sullivan — a tragic though not surprising development that revealed all that is wrong in civic life when ego, opportunism, and shameless expediency replace moral and spiritual integrity, not to mention courage, in the political decision making process.
There is considerable irony in the fact that the real shame in all of this rests not with the relative small handful of local girls who "got themselves pregnant" last school year. The real shame has to do with the deplorable way city leaders, along with many of the rest of us, dealt with the media storm that blew into town following news that the pregnancies may have been the result of some kind of shared secret, or agreement, among the girls.
And so it was the entirely unwelcome, unflattering, and undeserved attention given this good and decent community by the regional, national, and international news-as-entertainment industry that then so quickly became the "crisis" for which not one of this city's top elected or appointed officials proved willing or able to handle.
Instead, the children and adults of this community bore witness to a classic case of blame shifting, as Gloucester's chief executive officer and top school appointee conveniently sought out and found a fall guy in the only stand-up, straight-shooter in the entire in-school-house teen pregnancy affair, Dr. Sullivan.
All of which leads back to the encounter mentioned at the top of this piece, an encounter during which the unnamed individual in question sadly admitted that he no longer recognized his country.
"Jim," the man said to me, "what passes for life in America today isn't what the men I served with fought and died for on the beaches of Normandy 64 years ago. I don't recognize my country anymore."
Citing the steady decline in values that he believes has occurred in America over the many decades, my friend then told me that he had managed to put aside enough money to spend the last years of his life in either New Zealand or Switzerland. "It's too late for this country," he explained, referencing America's "collapse" to that of all earlier "great nations and empires."
I've thought a lot about that encounter in recent days. Still, the steadily worsening hardships of everyday life for most Americans give cause for wonder. Could the nation be sailing headlong toward something similar to that experienced by the Roman Empire? My friend is convinced that has already happened.
I'm not so sure, though I do believe the over-sized blinders with which we citizens have for far too long allowed ourselves to be fitted had better soon come off, lest we fail to recognize and deal with the many corrosive elements within society that now so threaten the health and future well-being of the entire nation.
Non-Western observers of the American social and political model, such as the staunchly anti-communist Alexander Solzhenitsyn, often speak of the "meaningful warnings that history gives a threatened or perishing society." Among such warnings, in the view of the late Soviet dissident, "the decadence of art, or a lack of great statesmen."
"The human soul," he declared in a voice that spoke for millions on every continent of the globe, "longs for things higher, warmer, and purer than those offered by today's mass living habits, introduced by the revolting invasion of publicity, by TV stupor, and by intolerable music."
Certainly here in Gloucester, the souls of those such as ordinary mothers, carpenters, teachers, plumbers, school children, nurses, cleaning ladies and physicians, all long for things "higher, warmer, and purer" than the recent public tar and feathering of so good and honorable a man as the now unhappily departed Dr. Sullivan.
Such crass and heartless action on the part of certain members of local government only serve to further diminish the low opinion many in the public already have of today's politicians.
Like it or not, as Solzhenitsyn warned 30 years ago, it is the consequence of well-known human imperfections, such as pride, arrogance, elitism, self-interest, and envy, that account for the many grave, damaging, and unconscionable errors in civic leadership that we citizens have seen committed here over the years, but especially of late.
It is these deep-rooted human imperfections that we must struggle to overcome, for at stake is the soul of our community, something that now appears very much in danger of being put up for sale.
Jim Munn is a writer and boys track coach at Gloucester High School.
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