EDITORIAL: Time To Try Men's Souls

(EDITOR'S NOTE: We take the opportunity today to republish the Inter Lake’s Fourth of July editorial from 50 years ago. It is a healthy reminder that the troubles we face today are not new. Economic disparity, social unrest, undeclared wars and foreign quagmires, disillusionment, challenges brought about by technology, the retreat into isolationism — all those topics were on the agenda in 1965 just as they are today. The freedom we celebrate comes with an awesome responsibility. This editorial reminds us not to waste it.)

July 4, 1965, comes midway in a year whose first six months have been a period of crucial testing of the fiber of this nation and whose remaining months undoubtedly hold still more severe troubles in store for us and the world.

It is, as Dickens said of an earlier year, both “the best of times and the worst of times.”

At home, economic expansion continues apace, but the affluence it creates reveals in starker contrast than ever before the material and spiritual poverty in which millions of Americans still live.

Each gain that has been made in social justice promises greater unrest in the future and a how very far we have to go before all Americans can partake equally of freedom and opportunity.

Abroad, more new nations breathe the heady atmosphere of independence, and more fall prey to political and economic chaos and the tug of war of competing ideologies.

In Vietnam, real war goes on at an accelerating pace, bringing both hope that it must end in the best and fear that it will lead to the worst.

It is not only the times when there are clear-out choices and unmistakable calls for sacrifice that try men’s souls, as Thomas Paine wrote. This period of ambiguous crises and shadowy possibilities through which we are moving, of undeclared wars in which American soldiers die in handfuls at a time, is in some ways even more difficult than if we were faced with actual massive attack upon the life of the nation.

For many Americans, international uncertainties engender fear and distrust of the awesome military power we possess and a desire to retreat into what historian Henry F. Graff of Columbia University calls neoisolationism.”

For others, the disruptions and demands of social evolution at home breed disillusionment with the American system, suspicion of neighbor and a longing to return to an individualistic independence that never existed.

But America can neither abdicate its position as leader and defender of the free world, no matter how undesired the hazardous and costly role may be, nor can it wish away the domestic challenges brought on by growing population, technology and changing human needs.

It is the best of times and the worst of times. It is a time to try our souls.