Two books recently released by authors occupying different positions on the political spectrum struck me as intertwined in their message. Michael Barone’s Hard America, Soft America describes the contrast, over several generations of Americans beginning with the Progressive era, as well as among different segments of contemporary society, and I generalize, of a “hard” America of competition, struggle, risk, and deferred gratification, and a “soft” America of entitlement, aversion to risk, absence of accountability, security, and equality, and he sees evidence now of a return to a primacy of the “hard” version, the countercurrents of which have been building for about twenty years, mostly as a result of the experiences learned through “softness”. Tim Russert’s book, Big Russ and Me, is a personal memoir of his life, growing up in Buffalo, New York, his maturity, and his relationship with his father, the most striking aspects of which, to me, were the lessons he learned from this man of very little education, low economic status as a garbage truck driver, and obviously of “hard” America attributes. In discussing his book, Russert is quick to point out the challenge he faces in conveying to his own son the values he learned from his father in an environment so saturated by his own success in public life and the ubiquity of “soft” (my word, as described by Barone) America. In my own way, I have often thought of what this problem must have been like for my father (and whether or not he was successful!), and I wonder what lies in store for the next generation of Americans, for, as Barone instructs us, “`soft` America lives off the productivity, creativity, and competence of `hard` America, which protects the country and pays its bills; we have the luxury of keeping parts of our society soft only if we keep enough of it hard.”
