[Excerpt from] The Walter Capps Memorial Speech
Federation of State Humanities Councils Annual
Meeting
Washington,D.C., November, 2000
[Editors note: The original speech delivered by David Skaggs at the Federation of State Humanities Councils National Conference held in November 2000 in Washington, DC]
Humanities Iowa, through its Art of Association project, has been addressing statewide questions relating to civility and multiculturalism. Part of this initiative blends nicely with thoughts from David Skaggs, a former Congressman who chaired a Bipartisan Retreat for our National Legislators with the purpose of restoring civility to the bruising rhetoric of our national politicians. The following are some of his thoughts:
...If you'll forgive a slightly whimsical question, let me ask you the difference between recycling and voting? Why is that in the last 30 years recycling has caught on with more and more of us, growing from 6% to now over a third of our fellow citizens, while voting has gone south, from about half in the congressional elections in 1968 to about a third of the eligible population 30 years later? About half of us who might have voted last week did so. What is it about the logic of one bottle plus one bottle that is inherently more compelling than one vote plus one vote? With each, you have to overcome a comparable, rational question about why my individual action does or does not make a difference in either case.
I think it has to do with a faith that has been nurtured by the environmental ethic over the last generation, while the comparable political ethic has been eroded and undermined by all manner of things. It has left us with a majority in the House of Representatives which for the 106th Congress was elected by 17% of the people. The majority in the next Congress will have been elected by about 22% of us. This is how we honor Jefferson's proposition that "just power is derived from the consent of the governed." Now of course, we can't mandate voting, and people freely decide whether to participate or not. But I think we are coming perilously close to the point where people will question the legitimacy of power, because they will have chosen to withhold their consent.
I fear that we may have reached the point where the average American these days as likely as not sees his or her relationship with the government in much the same way as their relationship with Home Depot. That is, it is an economic, almost a commercial, transaction. I pay taxes, I get services, that's it. Lost for many if not most of our fellow citizens is a civic faith that they are a participant in shaping our common future together, that they are shareholders in a commonwealth. We need to find and nurture a sense of civic virtue or faith comparable to the growing sense of environmental virtue and faith, that we are profoundly invested in each other and how we manage our lives together...