Some Thoughts in a Time of Crisis

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With our elected representatives in Congress fighting like kindergartners and the last-minute deal to increase the debt ceiling of the United State of America, with the subsequent down-grading of our credit rating by Standard and Poor and the resultant schzoid insecurity in the stock market, there are those who are running about shouting “The sky is falling! The sky is falling!”

I don't know what the further repercussions will be, but I do know that a lot of us are worried – if not about our economy, about our government and its inability to do the simplest, most necessary things – and I thought it might be good to look at this from a different perspective.

I happened upon a book recently that was a collection of three books by the French aviator and writer, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. I have always loved Saint-Exupéry's Little Prince, so I was interested in reading his memoirs contained in these three books.

In the last of the three, I found some insight that I believe has some bearing on our current situation. Before I share these insights, though, let me put them into context.

Saint-Exupéry was a pilot who flew reconnaisance missions for the French resistance in the dark days of World War II when France stood virtually alone against Hitler and his Wehrmacht. In the bleak days of 1942, Saint-Exupéry flew a mission which he chronicled in Flight to Arras.

He was relatively sure that France had failed in her defence and would go down in defeat, yet he took off out of a sense of duty. During the flight, he experienced heavy anti-aircraft fire and later, when to his own surprise he made it back to base alive (in 1944 he didn't make it back), he pondered what he was fighting for. These are his thoughts, excerpted from his book, Flight to Arras.

“Tomorrow we of France will enter into the night of defeat. May my country still exist when day dawns again. What ought we do to save my country? I do not know. Contradictory things. Our spiritual heritage must be preserved, else our people will be deprived of their genius. Our people must be preserved else our heritage will become lost. For want of a way to reconcile heritage and people in their formulas, logicians will be tempted to sacrifice either the body or the soul. But I want nothing to do with logicians. I want my country to exist both in the flesh and in the spirit when day dawns. Therfore I must bear with all the weight of my love in that direction. There is no passage the sea cannot clear for itself if it bear with all its weight....

“We are warmed by the awareness of the ties that bind us to our people—wherefore we feel ourselves already victorious. We know that we are one with the rest. But that the rest may know it, we must learn to express it. That is a matter of consciousness and language. A matter also of avoiding the verbal traps of superficial logic and polemical wrangling in which substance is destroyed. Above all we must not reject any part of that to which we belong....Since I am one with the people of France, I shall never reject my people, whatever they may do. I shall never preach against them in the hearing of others. Whenever it is possible to take their defence, I shall defend them. If they cover me with shame I shall lock up that shame in my heart and be silent. Whatever at such a time I shall think of them, I shall never bear witness against them....Thus, I shall not divorce myself from a defeat which surely will often humiliate me....I shall not contribute to these devisions between Frenchmen by casting the responsibility for the disaster upon those of my people who think differently from me....If I take upon myself a share in my family's humiliation I shall be able to influence my family. It is part of me, as I am of it. But if I reject its humiliation, my family must collapse; and I shall wander alone, filled with vainglory, but a shall as empty as a corpse....
“I reject non-being. My purpose is to be. And if I am to be, I must begin by assuming responsibility....Just as I refuse to complain of other Frenchmen, since now I feel myself one with France, so I am no longer able to conceive that France has the right to complain of the rest of the world. Each is responsible for all....Assuming that a a given moment the world lacked a soul, France owed it to herself to serve as the world's soul....The spiritual communion of men the world over did not operate in our favor. But had we stood for that communion of men, we should have saved the world and ourselves. In that tack we failed. Each is responsible for all. Each is by himself responsible. Each by himself is responsible for all....
“Thus man becomes the man of a country, of a group, of a craft, of a civilization, of a religion. But if we are to clothe ourselves in these higher beings we must begin by creating them within ourselves. The being of which we claim to form part is created within us not by words but only by acts....The essential act possesses a name. Its name is sacrifice....
“I believe that what my civilization calls charity is the sacrifice granted Man for the purpose of his own fulfillment. Charity is the gift made to Man present in the insignificance of the individual. It creates Man. I shall fight against all those who, maintaining that my charity pays homage to mediocrity, would destroy Man and thus imprison the individual in an irredeemable mediocrity.”
Read those words carefully. Then re-read them, substituting the words “ the United States” for “France” and “Americans” for “Frenchmen” and see if they don't have something to say to our government in its bitter wrangling and to those of us who call ourselves citizens in our confusion and dismay.