Are we any further forward?

Recently I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to travel to Washington D.C, the capital of the United States. The main area of interest in the capital is the National Mall and the many memorials that lie on it's periphery. 

Here are most of them;

DC War Memorial                                                          Korean War Veterans Memorial

Eisenhower Memorial                                                    Lincoln Memorial

Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial                            Martin Luther King Memorial

Jefferson Memorial                                                        Theodore Roosevelt Island

Washington Monument                                                  WWII Memorial

United States Air Force Memorial                                 United States Navy Memorial

From the list above you can see a lot of these memorials honour the many poor souls lost to various wars over the last few centuries, but the other memorials honour great champions of civil rights and general liberalism. 

Also from the list you might think that a trip to Washington D.C must be quite depressing, I didn't find it so, I found it to be hugely thought provoking. 

This brings me nicely onto the subject of this weeks blog, "are we any further forward"?

The site of the National Mall covers an area of 146 acres and to see all the buildings and outlying memorials takes at least 2 days, and that's at route march pace. By the close of the second day I'd made it round to the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial, and it was here reading the quotes from speeches he had made during his tenure that the cogs in my tiny mind began to turn.  

"We have faith that future generations will know that here, in the middle of the twentieth century there came a time when men of good will found a way to unite, and produce, and fight to forces of ignorance, and intolerance and slavery and war" 

"More than an end to war, we want an end to the beginnings of all wars".

From these profound quotes carved into the granite you get a glimpse of what FDR wanted and pictured the future to look like. His vision for the future was one of overwhelming tolerance, acceptance and most of all, of peacefulness. 

The blood shed he'd witnessed during WWII had convinced him that man must progress beyond such conflicts and be a beacon of light for democratic process. But his foresight went far beyond an end to just aggression.

"No country, however rich, can afford the waste of it's human resources. Demoralisation caused by vast unemployment is our greatest extravagance. Morally, it's the greatest menace to our social order".

"The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little".

FDR was dreaming of a new world order determined that those lost to war had not died in vain, he longed for a future where there were no hungry mouths or idle hands and men could do great things for the greater good.

I wonder what FDR would think of the world we live in today, where around 60 countries are currently involved in war of some description with nearly 400 different militia/guerrilla and separatist groups?

What would he think if he watched the news and saw the poverty that exists even in developed countries and yet last year the world bore witness to 128 new billionaires during an alleged global recession?

The Martin Luther King Memorial, homage to another great civil rights leader and forward thinker. He is famed for his "I have a dream" speech, this speech is widely regarded as one of the finest speeches in the history of American Oratory. It was delivered to over 250,000 people from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on August 28th, 1963 and was the defining moment of the American civil rights movement.

Looking on in admiration at this great monument I wondered if we would ever have statues built in years to come for the leaders of today. I tried to think of a president, prime minister or king of the present day who leads with such conviction, such selflessness and with such devotion to his people, and I couldn't think of any. 

I thought to myself, "maybe we don't have the struggles that they had during the early twentieth century", but I quickly dismissed this. Today we are beset with problems just as deadly and probably even more complex than they faced in the day of FDR or Martin Luther King. 

So why is it that today's leaders don't seem to have the spirit that leaders of the early twentieth century had?

Well, I'm obviously not in a position to read the history books of the future, but to me it seems like todays leaders are more preoccupied with pleasing third parties and financial backers, rather than the very people the were chosen to represent and they seem to fundamentally lack selflessness, a quality there predecessors had in spades. 

And there, in the presence of these great statues and quotes Idolised in stone, I stumbled upon the harsh realisation, that really when it boils down to it, we aren't any further forward.