Jimmy Carter, Part Two (R.I.P.)

We are sad to report the inevitable: Jimmy Carter (1924-2024) has bought the peanut farm.

I wrote about the late President at some length three months ago when he turned 100, and immediately right after I hit the “publish” button, I thought of some more things I wanted to say. And since they were positive things (and my centennial post wasn’t all positive) I thought I would save them for his passing, on the assumption that it couldn’t possibly be far in the future, as the man had been born during the Coolidge administration. Obits should be pretty positive. And this one will be — about the departed, anyway.

The thing I really, really REALLY liked about Carter (though it was his downfall) was his honesty about the fact that the challenges which Americans faced (and still face) require shared sacrifices. No other President or major candidate since Carter has shown the American people the courtesy of being so forthright, and boy will our grandchildren suffer for it, suffer as we are suffering now, but tenfold, a hundredfold. The fact that he was doing it during the energy crisis no doubt caused people to misunderstand. I’m sure many Americans thought that he meant that they should change their habits just so that he wouldn’t have to fix the problem. He was telling them unpleasant things like “Turn down your thermostat and wear a sweater” and “Drive smaller cars” and “Let’s invest in alternative energy”. And people balked. Their attitude was “Hell, no! Just get us cheap oil!” And Reagan did that (told them what they wanted to hear, and got the oil prices down) so they loved him — despite the countless problems we continue to face because of our reliance on and use of and addiction to fossil fuels.

Similarly (and this is a much smaller deal but a similar example of the idiocy of the American public): Carter, who was a scientist after all, very wisely (and bravely, I guess) sought to modernize America’s medieval system of weights and measures, and align us with the rest of the world by adopting the metric system. The arguments I had with my father encapsulated the stupidity of the public. Being of an age when I was still taking required science classes at school, I’d recently learned the metric system, with its much greater ease and speed of doing calculations. My father’s objections had to with the conversion. “Why should I have to learn something new?” he asked. The obvious answer to that was “Um, the way things are NOW you PERPETUALLY have to do conversions between the two systems. If the nation converts, you learn it once and never have to do it again!” But it was like arguing with a stone wall. This mentality is why a quarter of the way through the 21st century, America seems to be stampeding back to the 19th.

Leadership is not about caving in to whatever the mob wants. Granted, it is about persuasion, and Carter wasn’t very good at that. But I found Carter’s way much preferable to Reagan’s, which was basically to encourage everyone to drive gas guzzlers — basically “Eat, drink and be merry”. Sure, tomorrow we may die, but Carter was on the path to buying us a few more days. There will be a time at some point in the future, and probably not far in the future, when austerity and shortages and rationing and privation and so forth will be a permanent part of American life, and there will be NO option for the President to turn the spigot back on. There won’t BE anything to shove done our gullets and into our shopping carts. And when people complain, I guarantee our leaders won’t be as nice about it as Jimmy Carter was. The man had character. It was through the public’s mass reaction to Carter’s attempts to secure our future that I learned, quite early in life, that the American public no longer did.

Again my main post, with much much more on Jimmy Carter and his times, go here.