
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, March 6, 1990                   TAG: 9003062119
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A11   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Bob Willis Associate Editor
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

U.S. SELF-INDULGENCE

IT HAS COME to this: As hopeful democracies pop up like spring blossoms all over the world, they look to the prototype democracy, the United States, for succor. And their model is so drained from a binge of self-indulgence that it can do little more than pat their backs and wish them well.

Self-rule is not bought, and cannot be bestowed. Money alone cannot assure the success of an emerging democracy; it requires from that country's people sustained effort, discipline and a willingness to endure lean times with faith in a better tomorrow.

But it is worth remembering that when communism threatened the exhausted nations of Western Europe after World War II, the United States came to their side with massive financial aid: the Marshall Plan. When people are hungry, they are more inclined to worry about filling their bellies than preserving their freedoms.

We could not undertake such an aid project today; our pockets are empty. Yet the need may be just as pressing.

The Philippines and the nations of Eastern Europe and Central America now groping toward the light could be compared with those of Western Europe in 1945. Some have been through wars of sorts. Their people have endured shortages of food and other goods. They also lack the kind of traditions that help democracy - a difficult form of government under the best of circumstances - to succeed.

If their fledgling democratic governments cannot satisfy their material needs, they soon may turn to something else. It won't be called communism - except for Panama and the Philippines, they've been under that kind of regime, and want no more of it - but it could be something just as authoritarian. And the consequences to peace could be severe.

For more than a century, the United States has preached to everyone else the virtues of self-rule - sometimes with an irritating smugness. Now and then, we've tried to bring those blessings to others at the point of a gun. But others have come to believe in our system, and not solely because of America's wealth.

We are their model. Many nations have patterned their own constitutions on ours. When the leader of Poland's Solidarity movement, Lech Walesa, spoke to a joint session of Congress last Nov. 15, he opened his talk with the words: "We the people."

When Czechoslovakia's President Vaclav Havel addressed Congress Feb. 21, he thanked Woodrow Wilson for supporting formation of Czechoslovakia's modern independent state: "founded, as you know, on the same principles [as] the United States of America."

Walesa moved many members of Congress to tears, perhaps in realization of how much innocence our own country has lost. Havel, an intellectual, left his Washington listeners awed by what they called his moral authority, a commodity notably lacking in U.S. political life nowadays.

Also lacking in our political circles is much sense of responsibility or accountability. That is a foundation stone of democracy. Yet many of us behave as if there is no tomorrow. For the past several years the nation has been engaged in single-minded pursuit of goods, and the devil take the hindmost - not to mention the bills that will one day come due.

Havel was talking about his own country, but his words held meaning for all people when he said:

"[W]e still don't know how to put morality ahead of politics, science and economics. We are still incapable of understanding that the only genuine backbone of all our actions, if they are to be moral, is responsibility. Responsibility to something higher than my family, my country, my company, my success - responsibility to the order of being where all our actions are indelibly recorded and where and only where they will be properly judged."

I have never belonged to the noisy order of chest-beaters who bemoan our society's moral flabbiness; too many of them seem to think that the best cure for it is preparing for, or going to, war. To my way of thinking, the greatest moral strength lies in the kind of responsibility Havel referred to.

Some would say he alluded to a higher power. That responsibility could also be to all other human beings; the principle is the same. Just one way of showing responsibility is to pay our own way. For decades we have not. As a result we are losing control of our fiscal destiny. We are also unable now to fulfill all our responsibilities to other nations that have admired us and tried to emulate us.

by CNB