News Journal: A Christmas wish for what the future could bring

The Christmas season always seems to bring out the best in us. But what does that mean? What’s our best?

I think most of us would agree that at our best we become less self-absorbed, focus more on our connection to others, and feel a heightened sense of community. It’s a shame that lately more of us haven’t carried that into the rest of the year.

As Americans, we believe in the rights and responsibilities of the individual. These are the rights enshrined in our Bill of Rights. Rugged individualism is a big part of the American experience and we have always honored those who came to these shores to find economic opportunity because “the streets were paved in gold.” We look back proudly on ancestors who conquered the frontier, depending on their own wits and labor to build family farms and ranches.

But we share another, equally American, heritage. As proudly independent as those pioneers were, when a neighbor was raising a barn they came together to help. We have always known there are things that can’t be done by individuals, that we have to act as a community to get big things done.

Clearly, both of these traditions are part of our first great national document, the Declaration of Independence. Our founders beautifully expressed the importance of the individual when they wrote, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” But they went on to give an equally important pledge: “And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.” Ben Franklin summed it up best in those perilous days when, after signing the Declaration, he wrote, “We must all hang together, or assuredly we will all hang separately.”

We still see and admire that sense of interdependence among our troops in harm’s way. But we haven’t seen much of it lately in Washington or Dover. It seems to have been lost in much of our political discourse today.

I’ve heard some people say it is a lot more difficult to be concerned about others during tough economic times, when your primary worry is losing your job or finding a new one. True enough, I suppose, but the stories my parents told me about the Great Depression of the 1930s made it clear that Americans then had a sense they were in the same boat. Maybe that’s why, as terrible as those years were, this was the decade when we built many of our greatest dams and bridges and the infrastructure that brought electricity to rural America.

Wouldn’t it be great if we were building today the infrastructure that would enrich our children’s lives tomorrow? Instead, as our roads and bridges deteriorate, as we fall behind other countries in updating electrical and Internet grids, we seem to have put that kind of collective action on indefinite hold.

We have also witnessed over the past couple of decades a widening economic gap between the very rich and the rest of the country. Can we as a nation agree that we want to reverse this trend?

There are hopeful signs. There is at least a growing national dialogue that recognizes the stark reality of the income gap. And a lot of Americans of different religious beliefs seemed to welcome Time Magazine’s choice of Pope Francis as “Person of the Year.” “If somehow by his own vivid example,” Time’s editors wrote, “Francis could bring the church into a new relationship with its critics and dissidents –agreeing to disagree about issues that divide them while cooperating in the urgent mission of spreading mercy –he might unleash untold good. ‘Argue less, accomplish more’ could be a healing motto for our times. Francis says by example, Stop bickering and roll up your sleeves. Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good –an important thing for the world to hear … ”

Argue less. Accomplish more. Spread mercy. I can’t think of a better Christmas wish for all of us.

Ted Kaufman is a former U.S. senator from Delaware.