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

DATE: SUNDAY, May 28, 1995                   TAG: 9506020012
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: G3   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: ALAN SORENSEN
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

ASK NOT

What jolted me wasn't so much the mention of Kennedy's name, as the context. This Tech staff person and former political aide, Darrel Martin, was not invoking the deconstructed, pathetic figure that later critics and historians have left us with. He was recalling the spirit of Kennedy's time, the impact a young president had on many Americans.

Once upon a time, public service was a noble calling. Once upon a time, Kennedy had said: Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.

Contrast that mood, Martin was saying, with the cynicism that now surrounds and confounds public affairs and community-service initiatives. In an age when government service is relentlessly derided and demeaned, it isn't surprising that public employees, including at Virginia Tech, should suffer low morale.

I remember Kennedy, admittedly through a glow of naive sentiment. I was just a kid. But I lived in Washington then, my father and uncle worked in the Kennedy administration, and I couldn't help but soak in some of the spirit.

In those days, many people answered Kennedy's call to service. Many lives were infused with the idealism that he and his brothers symbolized, even as it was corroded over the years by assassination, scandal, war and cynicism.

In those days, you wouldn't have witnessed a Gov. Allen insulting state employees at every opportunity, as if they were all lazy ne'er-do-wells and nincompoops feeding at the public trough.

In those days, you wouldn't have heard a Newt Gingrich ridiculing AmeriCorps, a modest national-service initiative in which some 20,000 young people have been providing remedial tutoring to disadvantaged children, building Habitat-for-Humanity homes and cleaning up pollution sites and inner-city neighborhoods, in return for vouchers to help fund their college educations.

Nowadays, if any group has come in for more bashing than public servants, it's been the poor.

The gap between rich and impoverished in America is wider than in any other industrialized country - including more traditionally class-oriented societies like Great Britain - and it grows wider by the day. Our child poverty rate is four times the European average.

Yet people don't speak nowadays of "those less fortunate than ourselves." The poor are demonized, blamed for everything from promiscuity to the federal deficit.

I'm not sure why Darrel Martin's comment prompted this delayed reaction in me. I'm not prone to indulge in nostalgia. I can't imagine anyone wanting to return to the America of the early 1960s. I believe that bureaucracy is deadening, that welfare hurts the poor.

But I also believe that we lose and mock idealism at our peril.

Politicians and political groups demand a return to "traditional values." OK, in America, that would generally refer to biblical or republican roots. The Christian Coalition recently called for eliminating federal funding for the Legal Services Corp., a program that helps poor people gain access to legal assistance. Would Jesus have stood with the slumlords against Legal Services?

Classic republicanism has held, from Aristotle through Jefferson, that free institutions thrive in societies enjoying rough equality of conditions; that republics in the long run are incompatible with extremes of wealth and poverty. How does that square with the fact that the wealthiest 1 percent of U.S. households own some 40 percent of America's wealth, and the richest 20 percent own 80 percent?

In his sermon, "A Model of Christian Charity," which he delivered in Salem harbor just before his ship landed in 1630, John Winthrop said: "We must delight in each other, make others conditions our own, rejoyce together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our community as members of the same body."

Those words, to me, are just as American as today's sneering contumely against public servants or self-interested demands for tax cuts, and they are at once more gentle and more inspiring.