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Cynthia Tucker: Biden urges us to regain our sense of national purpose |
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Cynthia Tucker: Biden urges us to regain our sense of national purpose

After Joe Biden’s Rose Garden announcement, news reports naturally focused
on his decision not to seek the presidency. But the overarching theme of
his short address was something more powerful and less political: This is a
great country that ought to be more optimistic about its potential, more
ambitious in its goals, more confident about its future.

That theme underlay Biden’s clarion call for a “moonshot” to cure cancer.
As he noted — “It’s personal,” he said — his grief over the untimely death
of his son, Beau Biden, fueled his sense of urgency. The younger Biden,
Delaware’s attorney general, died in May at the age of 46, after a long
battle with brain cancer.

Still, the vice president struck a chord too long missing from our public
debates, too little heard in our partisan warfare: We have the ability to
accomplish great things when we summon the will to do so.

“I know we can do this. The president and I have already been working hard
on increasing funding for research and development, because there are so
many breakthroughs just on the horizon in science and medicine. The things
that are just about to happen, we can make them real with an absolute
national commitment to end cancer as we know it today. ... If I could be
anything, I would want to be the president that ended cancer, because it’s
possible.”

Whatever happened to that feisty spirit in our civic life? Whatever became
of our sense of never-ending achievement, of unbridled national ambition,
of great national purpose? Why don’t we reach for the stars anymore?

Instead, we’ve become brittle, limited in our expectations, dour in our
outlook, afraid that the nation’s best days have already passed. While the
lingering effects of the Great Recession, as well as the global threat of
terrorism, have undoubtedly worked to dampen our optimism, history teaches
that we’ve faced down more daunting odds before.

Indeed, the long-running Cold War, when the Soviet Union represented an
existential threat to the United States, inspired the great space race that
led to Neil Armstrong’s walk on the moon. The United States poured money
into the sciences, down to the high school level. That period of bountiful
scientific research benefited not only NASA, but also countless other
streams of inquiry — including the pioneering communications work that led
to the Internet.

Since the 1970s, though, Congress has slowly drained away money from the
sciences, a process that has sped up over the last few years. In their
current obsession with reducing federal government spending, GOP budget
cutters have hacked away at everything from medical research to space
exploration.

Nowadays, Congress can’t even agree to fund things that we know work. While
all reasonable people agree that the country needs to repair and rebuild
its aging infrastructure — bridges, highways, dams — Congress cannot manage
to set aside the funds that are necessary.

During his first presidential campaign, President Obama called for a
massive revamping of the nation’s electric grid, a plan to put in place the
energy infrastructure for the 21st century. But that’s rarely even
discussed anymore.

Instead, a small minority of vociferous partisans holds up routine
legislation, such as raising the debt ceiling to pay the bills we’ve
already incurred. That’s how a great nation behaves?

It’s not clear that even a massive infusion of research dollars — Biden’s
“moonshot” — would lead to a “cure” for cancer. Scientists would likely
even debate the use of the phrase, since cancer is not a single disease but
rather a group of diseases that share the phenomenon of abnormal cell
growth.

Still, Biden’s call for pouring national resources into the search for
better treatment options makes sense. When President Kennedy said, “We
choose to go to the moon!” our scientists weren’t certain we could do that
either. But they dared to dream big dreams. Why don’t we do that anymore?


Eric D. Schwerin
eschwerin@rosemontseneca.com

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