One Nation Whining Under God

Surely two of the great things about being George Will are the facts that he’s not running for office and that he has about the same level of job security as a Supreme Court Justice or the Pope. This allows him the luxury of saying some really unpopular things, particularly when they are true. During the roundtable section of George Stephanopoulos’ show, Phil Gramm’s remarks on “a nation of whiners” were brought up, prompting George Will to jump into the breach.

Of course, Phil Gramm is absolutely right… We are the crybabies of the Western world. We have an extraordinarily low level of pain tolerance.

While some are complaining about it mightily, that phrase really stopped me in my tracks and I’ve been pondering it all day. An “extraordinarily low level of pain tolerance” indeed. While I have never been a cheerleader for the war in Iraq, on at least one point I think I can understand some of the thinking of the administration. Why have Americans not been asked to make sacrifices to run this war, as we have during conflicts in our more distant past? Probably, I imagine, because whatever popular support the war enjoyed during the early years would have evaporated like mist in the morning valley.

Were those who came before us – that Greatest Generation – really that much tougher and, well… greater? During World War Two, our citizens on the home front were asked to make tremendous sacrifices – at least to our modern way of thinking. But it bears remembering that these were people who had lived through the great depression. Grow a victory garden? Recycle your tin foil? Donate the odd pot or pan to be melted down for the war machine? Baby food! They had seen much worse. I wonder what they would make of our complaining about the perceived shortcomings of our current health care system? Many of these were the same folks who survived the great influenza pandemic of 1918 when there was no social support network, healthcare (such as was available) was oh so crude by comparison, and they had literally been watching people dying in the streets.

My grandparents’ generation also had clear memories and family stories of the people who came before them who had it even worse. They had to live through the Great War of Northern Aggression. Famines were commonplace, medical procedures involved barbaric and largely pointless torture procedures which were far more likely to kill than cure, and they did it all by the light of whale oil lamps. Diseases which are now either virtually unknown or – at most – require the annoyance of a quick trip to the clinic, routinely ripped through towns and cities wiping out as much as two thirds of the population at times.

We just bred ‘em tougher in those days, not from any ingrained sense of, “We are Americans and we must be tough!” but rather out of simple necessity and the immutable laws of Darwin. Those who were tough, survived, and those were were not, well… did not.

Today we take all of these benefits for granted and our idea of “sacrifice” would be curious indeed to our forebears. The vast majority of us not technically homeless sit comfortably protected from the weather. The loss of a job is painful, but there is unemployment insurance and, if you must, welfare. Most any medical challenge can be met, and even facing the unthinkable we can be kept mostly pain-free in hospice to await our end in peace. We expect our government to take only a bare minimum of our paychecks in taxes, but demand that it keeps the price of everything low, the supply plentiful, and that we be discomfited to no significant degree while we engage in our own, individual pursuits of happiness.

There are plenty of things going on with our government and society where clear room for improvement exists. And, of course, we’re free to comment on it. But let us not pretend that we’re not a bunch of whiners. Our threshold for personal pain and sacrifice would likely send those who cleared the way for us into howls of laughter.