ideas - uproar

"Everyone is entitled to his own opinion but not to his own facts."
--  Daniel Patrick Moynihan

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I feel as if, when I read, & look at how
problems were solved, and
positive accomplishments engineered
in America, during past times, then a person can see -- maybe two things, anyway...
1) how things worked -- or didn't,
and
2) that some current challenges we have, have been seen before -- arguments we hear today have been made before -- familiar tactics and strategies, when we read about them, we can say, "Oh-h!  So Senator How-do-ya-do, or Representative Hand-in-trough are not so new, or endemic only to the 21st century -- this kind of (tactic / behavior / silliness / whatever) has been seen before....oh and--here's how they approached it, then....

People can get a deeper, richer perspective by viewing incidents in recent history.  (Or -- should say, all history, it's just that Recent is my favorite....)

[excerpt]---------------------  Daniel Patrick Moynihan led a singularly American life, but it was a life unlike any other in modern America.

As a youth in New York, Pat Moynihan struggled with poverty in a family devastated by the disappearance of his father at the height of the Great Depression.  Young Pat shined shoes, tended bar, worked the piers as a longshoreman, and

stole rides by clinging spread-eagled to the back of the crosstown bus to get to high school in Harlem. 

He briefly attended City College of New York before joining the Navy as a teenager during World War II.  He served as a gunnery officer, traveled the world, returned to complete an undergraduate degree from Tufts....  He wandered almost accidentally into campaign politics in New York City. 

And he then rose to become perhaps the most influential public intellectual of his time.

Moynihan was a pathfinder in John F. Kennedy's New Frontier, a commander in Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty and Great society, and an enabler in many greater and lesser moments of Richard Nixon.  He was a renowned professor at Harvard well before becoming a successful politician.  He was an outspoken envoy and challenger of shibboleths and of anti-Semitism while serving as ambassador to India and the United Nations. 

In four terms in the Senate -- working with (or against) Presidents Carter, Reagan, Bush, and Clinton -- he made a decisive impact in the areas of welfare reform, public works, transportation projects, international law, congressional prerogatives in the cold war, and the challenge to the cult of secrecy in Washington.  He achieved these goals while setting a standard of

bipartisanship

sorely missed today.  Determined that a nation's public spaces should reflect the legacy of its ideals, he was instrumental in the effort to revive some of America's greatest urban environments, from the Custom House in Lower Manhattan to Union Station and Pennsylvania Avenue in the nation's capital....
 
As early as 1979, he predicted the fall of the Soviet Union, saying it would crack up from economic stress and ethnic conflict.  Less well known, Moynihan was an early champion of automobile safety in the 1950s and is the one who brought Ralph Nader to Washington, jolting General Motors and causing a national uproar in the 1960s.

"Everyone is entitled to his own opinion but not to his own facts," Moynihan famously said, in one of many comments that entered political lore and that, if applied, would make for a healthier national discourse today.------------[end excerpt]

[Man -- don't we know it!]

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{Daniel Patrick Moynihan:  A Portrait in Letters of an American Visionary.
Ed. Steven R. Weisman.  Introduction.
Copyright, 2010, Public Affairs, member-Perseus
Books Group, New York}

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