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We don’t see as much community, or even family, loyalty these days. Why is that?
I think it has a lot to do with the rampant materialism in our country. Just look at sports. My brother and my father loved sports, but I never liked sports when I was younger. When I moved to Michigan in 1979, I was in a climate of sports obsession, so I decided to try to understand why sports were so important to people. And I saw that people who work hard at a job that maybe isn’t their thing attach themselves to a team for identity. I came to the conclusion that maybe sports is the only proper place for nationalism; that desire to have a team, to have a flag, to identify with something. With sports that desire isn’t harmful. It’s a release. It’s entertaining. And you can witness the grace and beauty of a great athlete.
But I was naïve and thought that when you joined a sports team, it was your team. Like, the Rolling Stones didn’t trade Bill Wyman for Jack Bruce. So I would become attached to a team’s players, and the next year they’d trade Jack Morris to Toronto, and I’d say, “What do you mean? He’s
our guy.”
Throughout the 1980s I saw more and more materialism and a lack of loyalty by athletes and team owners; more athletes moving from team to team in search of higher salaries. This mercenary attitude in sports is an indication of what’s going on in our country, and in families. Couples get divorced because marriage isn’t fun, or having kids is too stressful. People bail out. They don’t respect the institution of marriage. They don’t understand that children aren’t puppies: you don’t drop them off at the grandparents’ and not come back for two years. And everybody’s working so they can buy their kids more things. Kids have plenty of material possessions but no spiritual guidance, no real communication with their mother and father. The result is a lack of loyalty and cohesiveness within the family and the community. And it’s reflected in the culture.
It hasn’t always been this bad. I remember that when Jimmy Carter was president, he actually inspired me. He asked the American people to sacrifice. He asked us to bring down our thermostats, to use less energy, to buy fewer material things. He asked us to strip away a lot of what we didn’t need and in that way to help our environment. He also asked us to develop ourselves spiritually and mentally.
But what happened is that people found his requests offensive; they didn’t want to sacrifice. Then Ronald Reagan said to the people – and I’ll never forget this – he said that American children deserve a bicycle in every garage. He wasn’t talking about a chicken in every pot, or an education for every child. He was saying that we deserve certain material possessions. That made a big impression on me. All the way through the Clinton era, people embraced this idea that we deserve certain material things, that our children have to have them, and if they don’t have them, then they’re deprived This has really hurt our country, the fabric of ourselves, our network as human beings.
-- interviewed by Greg King in The Sun
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