Their Land, Too

The idealized America of Ronald Reagan stands just around the corner. It consists of neat little towns with wide, clean Main Streets lined with elms and maples; where citizens bustle to their shops and offices each day; where families gather closely around the dinner table in the evening, and join hands in worship on Sunday in the polished pews of the white church with the steeple. On Thursdays the men clasp hands over full stomachs after service-club luncheons and congratulate themselves on the good fortunes of their businesses. Wives never know fear or despair, because the mortgage and all the bills are always paid on time and the savings accounts are growing.

The children are well fed, neatly dressed and respectful of their elders. They study hard on their computers, dream of well-paid silicon careers and do not complain about going on Sunday drives after church with their parents.

The fires of industry burn brightly, for they now are free of the burdensome directives of a far-off government and the oppressive demands of labor unions. Lawbreakers are quickly brought to justice and are severely punished, sometimes with death. The people of the towns sleep peacefully, because the stars now share the sky with silent machines that will turn to harmless dust the most threatening of weapons from any would-be enemy.

Neighbors help each other in times of adversity, and there is little need for government other than to collect taxes to pay for more silent machines in the sky.

This is the sort of shining city on the hill, the America, the Main Street to which the President alluded in his State of the Union address on Wednesday. There is one basic key to it, found in a simple phrase in the middle of his glowing speech. It is a tax system that will make the American economy “the engine of our dreams.”

In the 18th day of his second term the President has distilled the American vision to an irreducible common denominator: Let government free the people to make money and all will be well.

It was a masterful speech that buoyed the hopes and comforted one slice of America--the part that is mostly white and mostly affluent. There was little in the speech for millions of other Americans who live in distress and hopelessness, the Americans who don’t make enough money to owe any taxes now, the Americans who shiver in homes that lack heat and lights and food.

These are the Americans who slip into drugs and crime for a host of complex social reasons, the Americans from other lands who struggle to learn in a strange language and give up, the Americans who see the loam of family farms slipping away in foreclosures, the Americans without autos who can barely afford transit fares now, the humiliated Americans who once proudly worked on assembly lines that are stilled forever.

This land is their land, too. Their hopes and fears are a part of all of us. Where is the message for them? It came not in the State of the Union address but in the blunt figures of the President’s 1986 budget on Monday. The gist of that message: Look elsewhere for help.