When I first met him, Bart was 30 years old and struck me as a little goofy. We were both sales reps working in a corporate technology enterprise, trying to sell products we had never used to customers who would never understand them.
Bart, somehow, was successful in this venture, and from him I learned the art of ethical salesmanship. This is nothing more than honest communication. Never mind that I characterized Bart as a guy who looked like Don Knotts and acted like Barney Fife. His self-deprecating, homespun humor was a disguise, concealing a highly insightful mind.
Part of what made Bart, Bart, was his military background. He had enlisted in the U.S. Navy during the Vietnam era to serve his country, see the world, learn a trade and obtain a regular paycheck.
I will butcher many of the details of this story, but I am never one to let actual events stand in the way of a moral point. Here goes:
In 1968, Bart was assigned to an ammunition supply ship running needed materiel to U.S. forces in Southeast Asia. He was one of the scores of sailors on board what amounted to a Navy cargo vessel.
They were docked in a harbor near a major city, which was probably Saigon (now Ho Chi Min City), but that’s one of the details I didn’t gather. Knowing Bart, it is quite probable he didn’t know where they were either. A sailor just does the sailor thing.
For reasons lost to history, a fire broke out below decks as they lay at anchor.
A fire on an ammunition supply ship with enough explosives onboard to level any city of any size is nothing to disregard. The fire was immediately accessed by a team of sailors trying to control spreading flames.
Bart was detailed to a small work party in the compartment next to the one on fire. Their job was to direct water from a high pressure hose onto the bulkhead (steel wall) to keep it from overheating.
Bart told me: “There were only a handful of us. We ran this firehose that sprayed water so hard and fast we could barely hang onto it. It was almost pitch dark in the room. Steam came off the wall as soon as the water hit it, making it impossible see anything. We ran the water back and forth across the bulkhead for what seemed like hours.”
I remember marveling at the story, seeing in my mind’s eye a cluster of half a dozen tee-shirt-clad teenagers, no doubt terrified, toiling in the dark against an invisible, hot monster.
They were virtually cut off from any communication from the outside. Presumably, the crew directly fighting the fire remained engaged, and would succeed. Bart and his companions, however, had no way of knowing. For all they knew, everyone else had abandoned the ship as a lost cause.
“The thing was,” Bart continued, “if that ship had gone up, a lot of the city would have gone up along with it. So really, there was no place to run to. I figured the other guys were still fighting the fire, because there was nothing else to do. I’m still here, so that’s probably proof enough that they got the fire put out.”
A small team of young men, trained for exactly this event, worked together with a single purpose against unknown and unknowable odds.
Teamwork
Unity of purpose. Clarity of direction. Without dedication to those precepts, those young sailors would have been incinerated. Either separately or in groups, it wouldn’t have mattered. Families would have been notified, bodies would have been impossible to recover, memorial services would have been held.
(Funerals, like this or different, were delivered to American families 58,000 times in the 10-year period of that undeclared war. Read the names inscribed in black granite on The Wall.)
Unity of purpose
The recent presidential contest has spurred my thinking into an age-old dilemma:
Standing in unity is not quite the same thing as standing on principle.
The argument has been made that Unity is the most powerful value to which we ought to aspire. Evidence:
The Founding Fathers unified 13 separate colonies into a single political and military force. With substantial assistance from France (but never mind that detail), they withstood the British superpower.
The Union government, under the leadership of Abraham Lincoln, managed to keep a relatively young United States united. The cost was some 600,000 lives. All those who sacrificed themselves thought they were doing the right thing, but for opposite reasons.
A surprised American populace, mired in economic depression, united together in a solid wall of productive democracy. That effort defeated Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in 4 years of bloody warfare involving unspeakable brutality.
Without unity of thought and clarity of direction, in each of these events this USA would have gone the way of virtually every other major world actor in recorded history. (We may yet. There is always time to fail.)
Unity has a dark side
And yet, history is replete with examples of the dark side of unity of thought. Look no further than the march of communism across the globe in the last century. As long as you toe the line, Comrade, you will have a place among us. Otherwise, you will need to be re-educated in a labor camp where you will most certainly die in captivity.
In today’s America, the value of unity is held aloft by both right and left. Join us in defense of what is right and proper! Those who oppose us must be rooted out and defeated!
That is a campaign slogan worthy of both liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans. Which means that Unity of Thought gives little guidance, if one’s intention is to have a society that is both prosperous and free.
Unity around what, exactly?
The guiding ethos lies elsewhere. It is somewhere along the lines of Agreed Principles. Whatever those may be.
Bernard Bailyn, 20th-century Harvard historian, wrote the 1967 classic, “Ideological Origins of the American Revolution.” Bailyn researched some 400 “broadsheets” (independent newspaper publications) printed in the 10 years leading up to the war for independence.
Bailyn concluded that Americans from all walks of life, through expressing and reading opinions, came to consensus around certain political principles:
We are strong only as we stand together against tyranny;
We have a God-given right to live our lives as we wish;
No government has a right to take away our wealth;
We shall either live free together or each die alone.
Those are my summary statements, not Bailyn’s. (It’s been 30 years since I hacked my way through Ideological Origins, and I now have chemo brain. So you may draw your own conclusions.)
Forming convictions in the Information Age
Today’s internet offers similar access to divergent opinion, but with one perhaps fatal difference: It is offered at negligible cost. That means anybody can say anything, and many do. This has resulted in a bewildering sea of information, mis-information, dis-information and opinion.
The advantage the colonists had was that every household was literate and reading material was scarce. The King James Bible was the staple of literature, but often the only book in the home. Broadsheets required a printing press and type-setting skill, setting up an unscalable financial barrier.
The broadsheets thus became precious, read and re-read, folded and re-folded as they passed from one farmer or merchant to another.
Theory and practice
I rebel at the concept of Unity of Thought as the preeminent value of society. The theory is fine, until the Unity decrees that someone else has a right to the wealth that I have worked for, or that I must be complicit in what I find to be another’s morally objectionable behavior.
The problem of how to create a collective government that protects individual freedoms has plagued mankind since the beginnings of recorded history. I don’t think we’ll solve it here.
It is written of the ancient Israelites that “everyone did what was right in his own eyes.” The consequence, recorded in the Old Testament book of Judges, was a disorganized, barbaric society devoid of protections for the weak.
That was bad, but by the time ancient Israel got a king who could rule strongly, it soon began to descend into idol worship and child sacrifice: “…And made his sons pass through the fire, according to the abominations of the heathen…” (2 Kings 16:3)
That did not end well for their nation. One way to understand that is to recognize that at some point, God will be aroused to action. In the case of Israel in those days, it involved military scourging, carried out first by Babylon, then by the Persians, followed by Greeks and Romans.
We would do well to recognize the parallels between 6th-century BC Israel and 21st-century AD America. The Apostle points out that “the things which were written before were for our instruction.” (my paraphrase of Galatians chapter 3)
God and government
Sifting through the morass of opinion available at my fingertips, I find a strong populist sentiment that America has for the last century slid toward the edge of a great moral cliff. That this is a widely held belief was undeniably reflected in the most recent presidential contest.
Donald J. Trump, imperfect vessel that he is, was the choice of the people to stop, or at least slow down, the slide. Under his leadership, our nation will do some things right, and other things not so right.
The nation will do better with our prayers.
“…that petitions, prayers, intercession and thanksgiving be made for … kings and all those in authority, that we may live peaceful and quiet lives…
1 Timothy 2:1
The USA has displayed shocking moral failures that dishonor the God of our fathers; of that there is no doubt. Yet I remain convinced that the American Experiment, a constitutional republic deriving limited authority from the consent of the governed, offers the only reasonable promise for prosperity and freedom. Not only for America, but for the entire world.
Winston Churchill said it this way: Democracy is the worst form of Government, except for all those other forms that have been tried.
Ronald Reagan echoed the thought, quoting Abraham Lincoln, who called America “the last best hope of man on earth.”
It is our government, warts and all.
Thanks for following The Alligator Blog. Share the post. This week, as you gather with friends and family, you do not have to be unified in your opinions, but it would be a nice touch to be respectful.
Remember the God Who so graciously bestows mercy on us all. May He bless your day.
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