Our Legacy: One More Reason Why We Need to Work Together

What happened to the belief that we all must, in the final analysis, work together? In the acrimony and blaming, in the refusal to suspend egos and alpha-dog behaviors in the name of a greater good, we are building a legacy, a remembrance of us, of small-mindedness, partisanship, anger, and stinginess-of-spirit. To use an argument’s form from Benjamin Franklin:

Except we work together, we labor in vain to build an effective, efficient, caring community. Without civility and cooperation we shall succeed in building a productive and equitable society no better than the builders of the Tower of Babel: we shall be divided by our little myopic, local and party interests; our projects will be confounded and we ourselves shall become a reproach and a byword of pettiness down to future ages. And what is worse, much worse, mankind may hereafter, from our unfortunate performances on this stage, despair of establishing government by human wisdom and amity, and leave off hoping for something better than chance, something better than power and domination, insult and ego.

This is a folly (paraphrasing E.O. Howard), a legacy our descendents will be least likely to forgive us for: the loss of faith and hope in the possibility that those in positions of responsibility can and will seek a common path forward, mindful of the greater good.