Sacrifice for Democracy

     "Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country."

If only.

Today's Guest Post asks us to imagine.

Imagine if Americans would unite on behalf of democracy in Ukraine by sacrificing for the common good. Imagine if people would willingly turn down their thermostats to 68, or carpool, to nudge down the price of Russian oil. Imagine if U.S. corporations willingly reduced their profit margins to share in the national sacrifice.

Rod Kessler is a college classmate. He is a retired professor of English at Salem State University in Massachusetts, where he coordinated their creative writing program. He suggests that Biden ask Americans to do just that.

Rod Kessler

His Guest Post is not parody. It isn't a creative piece with an unreliable narrator, a clueless Ichabod Crane character who had been asleep during the COVID crisis and misunderstands the world he awakened into. Sacrifice for Ukraine? Unify? Why a third of Americans wouldn't get a vaccination to save their own lives and to keep emergency rooms available in their own communities. A third of Americans support the insurrection to overthrow a democratic election here in the USA. This isn't a JFK world where  Americans will "pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship. . . to assure the survival and success of liberty."  It's a "Let's go, Brandon" world.

Rod's kind of earnest hope isn't naive. It is nostalgic. Rod's advice to Biden holds up a mirror to Americans. It shows us what we lost.

Guest Post by Rod Kessler

Let me start with the obvious: Whether we hear about rising gas prices on the news or directly at the neighborhood filling station, it’s no secret that the war in far-away Ukraine is impacting us at home. Because we have little stomach for sending in American troops to protect Kyiv, we’re putting the big squeeze on Putin’s Russia economically. But given globalization and our interconnected economies, we can’t clobber Russia’s economy without inflicting pain on our allies’ economies and on our own.

If I were in Joe Biden’s shoes, I’d already be asking my fellow Americans to willingly shoulder some of the economic burdens. I’d ask us all to consider lowering our thermostats by a degree or two to reduce demands on our energy supplies — and to lower our monthly fuel bills. If you like a 68-degree setting, try putting on an extra sweater and see if you can handle 67. Right now, such a sacrifice would be patriotic.
Likewise, can we car owners find ways to drive less or even reduce our speed to conserve and cut costs? Most of us would get a health boost from actually walking more. If the price of a gallon skyrockets to $5, could we conceivably make car-pooling work? Are we as a people capable choosing public transportation when we have the option? (Imagine the new slogan: When you ride the T, you give Volodymyr Zelenskyy a lift!) 

A younger Rod Kessler

Doing so would be patriotic.

Naturally, what’s true for gasoline and fuel prices is true for food prices too, what with the threats to Ukrainian wheat production. Yes, it’s already tough going at the checkout counters in the grocery store, but if I were in Joe Biden’s shoes, I’d be asking us to consider it our duty to adjust our diets to stay in synch with the foods that are still plentiful and affordable. Let’s have more new slogans: Eat beans and stick Putin with a gas problem.

Doing so would be patriotic.

Ours is a divided society, and half of us are happy to lay the blame for inflationary high prices on the Biden administration. Some Americans won’t go along with anything that the Biden White House proposes. Despite that, Biden hopes to promote unity. Maybe the situation in Ukraine will help us to reunify. If I were in Joe Biden’s shoes, I’d already be asking my fellow Americans to deal with a little sacrificing right now.
But I wouldn’t stop at asking only ordinary people like you and me and the rest of us fiddling with our thermostats or tanking up at the filling stations or pushing our carts at Market Basket. I’d be asking our huge corporations to share the costs of the crisis too. I’m talking about Mobil and Shell and National Grid. I’m talking about Archer Daniels Midland and Cargill and General Mills. I’m talking about Walmart and Safeway. Consider: when the price of gas and food rise, it’s not an act of nature. Corporations ultimately determine prices, and they do so, understandably, with an eye on the bottom line. In case you haven’t noticed, corporate profits have been healthier than ever, undaunted by the pandemic or by inflation.
To put it another way, those at the very top of the economic heap are somehow managing to do very well. But what if they too were expected to do their bit to make sanctions work? What if they could put the profit motive aside, even for just a little while?

Imagine how our day-to-day economic lives would change if our largest corporations decided to tighten their own belts and run on just half of their usual profits (or at cost!) for the duration of the conflict in Ukraine! Imagine the headlines: Amazon slashes prices until Putin withdraws. Imagine if up and down the supply chain for fuel and gasoline production all players agreed to proceed at an at-cost and zero-profit basis until the crisis ended. Costs for all of us would settle down. Talk of inflation would end. and we’d all be sharing the burden of the patriotic sacrifice for standing up to Putin, with his tanks and missiles and bombers.

If I were in Joe Biden’s shoes, I’d be on the phone right now with a bunch of corporate boardrooms. Doing so would be patriotic.