Election 2000: How Can AmericaBe True to Herself?by Alice Bernstein As Americans cast their ballots on November 7th — and I urge everyone to do so — we will be exercising our right to vote, which many people fought for and even gave their lives to achieve. I feel passionately that our purpose in voting should be to have people stronger. This is good will and I learned from Aesthetic Realism -- the education founded by America's great poet and economist Eli Siegel -- there is nothing our nation needs more in order to be true to herself. Aesthetic Realism, is the study of ethics in every aspect of life -- social, international, economic -- and while it is not political, it shows ethics at the heart of every political choice. Even with all the hype at the conventions, and polls taken practically hourly, in conversations I see numbness in people about this election. Despite constant TV and newspaper talk of a “robust” economy, millions of people holding two or more jobs to make ends meet, the elderly choosing between food and medication, the “working poor,” homeless and hungry adults and children -- know it is a lie, not how they live every day. In the international periodical, The Right of Aesthetic
Realism to Be Known, Ellen Reiss, Class Chairman of Aesthetic Realism,
describes the state of mind in people about the election:
What is really going on? In 1970 Eli Siegel alone of all economists explained that 1) profit economics -- which is based on contempt: the reaping of profit by a few persons from the labor and lives of many people -- has failed after hundreds of years, never to recover. And he 2) identified the cause, something new in history: ethics has become a force so powerful that it is ending the profit system. In her commentaries Ellen Reiss has documented with magnificent fulness the contemptuous, brutal measures of owners to increase profits. Every day brings new evidence as HMOs reject lifesaving procedures, drug manufacturers pay other companies not to produce affordable generic drugs, cigarette manufacturers poison and make addicts of people; Bridgestone Firestone manufactures defective, deadly tires. In her election commentary, Ellen Reiss explains:
How can elected officials really represent us? In his National Ethics Report of August, 2, 1968 -- which is true today -- Mr. Siegel described two ways of judging people, including a president: how much feeling or kindness they have, and how smart they are. He said: “There’s a feeling in America that the person to be hired or chosen as president should be a good man. We need an ethical president. It’s a tremendous crisis.” He said that when a president like Abraham Lincoln or Franklin Delano Roosevelt is thought of a good deal, it is because feeling is found in them. And Mr. Siegel showed that this feeling is equivalent to asking: Do people have what they need to live well and with dignity? “I say very plainly,” he continued “that any candidate who doesn’t say the industrial resources of America should belong to the American people, and that he’s going to get Congress to work out a way they can, will be dull.” I love the way Mr. Siegel refuted the tremendous attempt to equate the profit system with America, showing it to be wishful thinking and completely unAmerican. In Goodbye Profit System: Update he points out that there is nothing about the profit system in our Declaration of Independence or Constitution. “I do not see,” he said, “why we can’t have industry by the people, and for the people, and of the people. That is implicit in the Constitution. If government by the people, why not industry by the people?” I believe there is nothing people want more than America
owned by all of us. The study of Aesthetic Realism (which you can learn
more about from the not-for-profit Aesthetic Realism Foundation, 212-777-4490,
www.AestheticRealism.org)
can enable people to care increasingly for ethics and demand this from
our elected officials. Then these great words by Mr. Siegel can become
a reality: “The world should be owned by the people living in it. Every
person should be seen as living in a world truly his. All persons should
be seen as living in a world truly theirs."
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