Search This Blog

Friday, August 27, 2010

Great Society

The Great Society of Lyndon Johnson may have had numerous problems, and immense, too. It may have been poorly thought out.
But it was an investment in the future of the country and its infra-structure and our fellow citizens: health, education, welfare....

The country is the exploited timberland of my earlier post. We treated our favored position in the world as an unending resource. Instead, we have discovered it takes husbandry: investment in time, money, effort, and caring.
Posted by Montag at 8:42 AM

3 comments:

Ruth said...

That's a helpful trope: husbandry. Remember how they used to tell us to talk to our houseplants? Was it the talking? Or the paying attention every day that counted?

Take heart. Hold fast.

Friday, August 27, 2010 9:28:00 AM
Montag said...

I think it was both. Loving and Caring are the type of thing that really cannot be broken down into their constituent parts.

We may analyze them down into different parts, but in reality they are all one integral thing.

Just because our language and logic lets us analyze things down to minutiae does not indicate that such an analysis is in any way important.

Saturday, August 28, 2010 7:23:00 AM
Unknown said...

I have a friend who never refers to LBJ with anything but "poor Lyndon." Agree. He was a man, sometimes not a very likable man, whose heart was in the right place. Had it not been for the Vietnam tar baby, he certainly would be much higher in most of our estimations. No matter how flawed, the Great Society was about the common people, not the corporations who are wreaking our ruin.

Sunday, August 29, 2010 6:04:00 PM

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)