Despite Signs of Hope, America Rings With Sound of Griping : Attitudes: There’s no war or depression, but citizens are outraged. Are problems that bad, or are they just more visible?

Sister Jeanne O’Laughlin, who runs a private university in the pleasant suburb of Miami Shores, Fla., talks about “the floating anxiety we’ve been experiencing.”

Former newspaper editor Wiley Hilburn of Ruston, La., senses a “nameless, shapeless dread.”

Walter John Chilsen of Wausau, Wis., a father of eight, a veteran of World War II, a former Republican state senator, sees “a forewarning of revolution.” Mike Redman, a former prosecutor in Olympia, Wash., said: “In this kind of environment, you run the risk of a demagogue grabbing and running with the ball.”

What’s going on in the land of the free and the home of the brave? Why does the country seem so enraged at its leaders and so anguished about its future?

Across America in this springtime of freshness and hope, reporters took those questions to people in a position to speak for a constituency or a community. Those interviewed included a retired minister in San Antonio; a bank president in Knoxville, Tenn.; the editor of a Spanish-language weekly in San Jose; a juvenile judge who moved to Florida as a VISTA volunteer nearly 30 years ago to work in the inner city and has been there since.

On the surface, the fear and distemper don’t make much sense.

Yes, there’s a recession. But it’s ending and never was as bad as the last one, 10 years ago. Ninety-three percent of workers, after all, are gainfully employed.

Meantime, the Cold War is over. A 45-year threat of war with a ruthless tyranny is gone. The nuclear risk diminishes, a shroud of fear lifting.

Everywhere, America is envied, its democracy emulated. Muscovites line up for an American hamburger on a sesame seed bun. Asian youngsters buy worn-out blue jeans, all the more valuable because they were once worn by an American kid.

Yet discontent abounds here. Two-thirds of voters in the primaries say they can’t abide any of the candidates. Turnout is low, turnoff high. Ross Perot, a billionaire whose ideas still are a mystery to the country, draws thousands to his possible presidential campaign. Incumbents fear wholesale rejection; many jump ship.

Charlie Nash, 63, who lives on the Ohio farm where he was born--and who lived through the Depression, World War II, the Cold War, Korea, Vietnam, the assassinations, Watergate--said he has never seen his country so sour.

“I grew up in the Depression,” he said. “The country wasn’t in a good mood, but I don’t think it was as bad as the mood is right now. At that time, people helped each other.”

No single thing explains America’s malaise, say the people questioned by Associated Press reporters. But each new event, each new worry adds to the anxiety. Washington’s check-overdraft imbroglio would have been a one-week phenomenon in ordinary times. Now it lingers, a camel back’s straw, heavy enough to persuade congressmen to quit.

In the interviews, these were among the factors mentioned:

* Divided and deadlocked government, with a Democratic Congress and a Republican presidency. Donna Shalala, chancellor of the University of Wisconsin, said people see the political system overrun by interest groups and politicians concerned solely with getting reelected and “not leading us, not educating us.”

* Big government. “It’s in our pockets, it’s in our lives in every way. . . . It’s in our faces,” said home builder Roger Berle, who lives on Maine’s Cliff Island.

* The inability of many two-income families to do more than make ends meet.

* Unemployment and the disappearance of high-paying manufacturing jobs and the inadequacy of low-paying service jobs.

* Negative campaigning. “People are turned off,” said Chilsen.

* Television. It is seen as magnifying bad news, exposing people to the stalemate within government, ignoring what’s good in society and what works.

* The ire felt when people who are barely getting by on their own see others using food stamps.

* The fearsome cost of medical care.

* The failure of schools to educate. Said Dade County, Fla., Circuit Judge Thomas Petersen, the former VISTA volunteer: “We in juvenile justice historically say, ‘Stay in school; stay out of trouble.’ But you’re not going to go to school if you can’t read, your peers are dropping out, your mother doesn’t send you to school.”

* The perception that the Japanese are beating America at what used to be America’s own game.

Journalist Hilburn, who picks up his sense of what’s going on over breakfast every morning at the Huddle House just off Interstate 20 in northern Louisiana, said anger isn’t a strong enough word to describe what he hears. The word that comes to mind, he said, is “outrage.”

“Somehow the American dream has just wilted here,” he said.

Even Washington shares the disgust with Washington.

Hear what John C. Danforth, a Republican senator from Missouri and an Episcopal priest, a lawyer, a pillar of the Establishment, told colleagues:

“I have never seen more senators express discontent with their jobs. . . . I think the major cause is that deep down in our hearts we believe that we have been accomplices to doing something terrible and unforgivable to this wonderful country. Deep down in our hearts we know that we have bankrupted America and that we have given our children a legacy of bankruptcy. . . . We have defrauded the country to get ourselves elected.”

Amen to that, said Pat Lehman, 48, president of the Wichita, Kan., Area Labor Federation, a onetime toolmaker at Beech Aircraft.

“There were lots and lots of promises made to people the last 12 years,” Lehman said. “They were promised we were going to a service-based economy and there would be jobs for everyone.”

Well, she said, those jobs pay $4.35 an hour. “And the reality is nobody can live on that.” Two jobs per couple are needed just to pay for the basics, not the extras, she said.

“There are so many people working at lower paying jobs or working at a couple of part-time jobs,” added Michael Ferner, a labor organizer who got himself elected as an independent to the City Council in Toledo, Ohio. “All these folks are included in the ranks of the employed, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re feeling very secure.”

He yearns for the solutions of Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose New Deal put people to work and built Toledo’s library and zoo.

“The other day I was standing in the main lobby of the library,” Ferner said. “I thought to myself, my God, here we are in a building that is wonderful, built at the tail end of the worst depression this country has ever had. Now, here we are in an economy that’s not in good shape, but certainly not as bad off as we were then, and supposedly there’s no money to do these kinds of things?”

Rebecca Valdez, 37, daughter of a welfare mother born in Mexico, held two jobs until her son was born. Now she edits El Observador in San Jose while working on an advanced degree from Stanford University. She thinks people are angry because they now know enough to be angry.

“People aren’t putting their heads in the sand like ostriches anymore,” Valdez said. “They’re reading about this stuff, and listening to the radio and watching CNN and getting angry.”

TV indeed may be undermining faith in Washington, suggested Joseph McNamara, former police chief in San Jose, who started his career walking a beat in Harlem and later earned a doctorate from Harvard.

“People are seeing all the pettiness and special interests,” he said. “We’ve seen congressional hearings televised and realized what fools some of these people are. . . . The public is hungry for a politician who isn’t afraid to have intellectual discussions.”

He said Michael S. Dukakis, the Democratic presidential candidate four years ago, fumbled in failing to respond to the famous Willie Horton TV commercial, “and it’s been slogans ever since.”

“Even I feel a little irritated and hostile,” said chancellor Shalala at the University of Wisconsin, who was selected by Ladies Home Journal as one of the country’s 50 most powerful women.

“Nothing is getting done,” she said. “We have horrendous problems in health care and education, but we are just playing around the edges and no one is being honest with us.”

But it is just a phase, Shalala believes; “resilient” Americans will snap out of it.

What troubles Holly Gadbaw, 46, the former mayor of Olympia, Wash., and a graduate of Shalala’s university, is that children are “much more pessimistic” than their parents. She sees it in her own teen-age sons.

Maybe television is to blame, she suggested. It carries endless reports of drug use, violence, environmental degradation. “Where’s the balance?” she asked.

Television? Or politicians?

“The whole thing is, we don’t even know whose fault it is today. We don’t know where to put the blame. But we do expect something from elected officials.”

So said Leah Chase, who runs Dooky Chase, a Creole and soul food restaurant with food so appealing it draws people from all over New Orleans despite its scruffy neighborhood. She blames the lack of admirable leaders. She said she thinks America is more frightened than angry.

Don Baugh, 65, a retired Episcopal priest in San Antonio, knows teachers in his city’s barrio who are quitting because of the hostility of students--and their parents--when bad grades are handed out. Nothing is sacred; even the clergy is suspect these days, said Baugh.

He thinks maybe the end of the Cold War contributed to the national unease: “People need enemies.”

“Hope has been battered time and again,” said Sister O’Laughlin, who runs Barry University in Miami Shores. Job prospects worry college students. She knows a young man who is graduating with a $9,000 college loan debt; he is engaged to a woman who owes about as much.

Still, Sister O’Laughlin has not abandoned hope. She sounds a theme suitable for spring:

“In the Scriptures, it says fear is the beginning of wisdom,” she said.

“As a person of faith and hope, I really believe that the American people have the capability and courage to transcend this.”