Like a vacation or a weekend, we dismay at the end of this past week in America.
For this past week has been one of the most constructive, positive, ennobling weeks we have had in decades as a nation.
Yes, we mourn the loss of Sen. John McCain, but this past week of national mourning was as refreshing and therapeutic as each week over the last two and a half years have been hellacious.
For this, we both praise the memory of McCain, and mourn all that he took with him when he died.
This week has been a respite from the usual weeks of personal political poison, deprecation, triviality, deflection, bad language, personal debasement, and wholesale slaughter of the notion of free, multi-view debates flowing freely in this country.
The fault for this latter climate cannot rest solely with President Trump — although he has elevated — if you can use that word — all that is so despicable about each week since 2016, but it goes beyond that.
The climate of cheap, often vulgar popular ‘culture’ crowding out more serious entertainment and discussion; the accepted coarsening of daily language; the decline in civility and respect. Out willingness to tolerate bigotry.
Our moral equation of racist thugs with” good people”; our loss at the ability to put national honor, pride, justice, fairness, debate and process ahead of greed, anger, jealousy and vulgarity.
We mourn John McCain for who he was: an ordinary extraordinary man.
A man with self-avowed human flaws who managed to live a life of incredible honor, nobility, courage and commitment.
We mourn for all that McCain seemingly takes with him to the grave: the welcoming of all; the toleration and consideration of alternate views; the notion, as he said ” that America is better than that” when it came to doing many of the same, bad things that other nations do.
What has been so constructive about this past week is that there is a wildfire, a slightly submerged Moral Majority, if you will, that despises what we have become; that refuses to become the new, puerile, Orwellian order of life; that still believes in duty, honor, country — and people.
We have been hearing — and I confess to saying it, too — that “we’ll never have another McCain in our civic life.” True. We will never have any another one of us. We are all singular creations, endowed by God with individuality.
But, in his inimitable way, I can just hear John McCain reply to these statements about there never being another like him. ’Ah, for godsakes!’, he’d likely roar in his common volcanic temper leavened with humor and honesty; ‘This is America! Of course, we’ll have people like me — even better; because America is the greatest nation on earth and we are a people who always strive to do better’.
As for myself, my beleaguered, non-citizen, poor ancestors and many others came here because of the America that the McCain family helped to build, and that he and countless others fought to preserve.
That country is not gone, this past week reminds us.
The values that built us individually and collectively as Americans have not been snuffed out.
But, scratch the surface and you see through a week like this past one that while John McCain is no longer amongst those of us on earth, his soul burns brightly forever as does the America of the values that he championed.
Jon F. Weinstein
Port Washington
