The Vision of John McCain

Today is the funeral of a great American statesman, John McCain.

In the political environment of 2018 he had an unusually unifying and moral vision of America. He left us glimpses of that vision in his last book, "The Restless Wave."

He wrote:

"This wondrous land shared its treasures and ideals and shed its blood to help make another, better world. And as we did we made our own civilization more just, freer, more accomplished and prosperous...."

I don't know the details of McCain's foreign policy views but from this statement I believe he knew that business is important, but that everything in the world is not business. Human beings and friends and neighbors and allies are not businesses, and the relationships between friends and neighbors and allies are not business relationships.

Helping other countries doesn't mean we are losing, it means we are investing in a better future for all of us. When a friend or an ally needs help you don't try to calculate how much profit you are going to make, you calculate how much you can afford to give, and then you give it, trusting that everyone will be better off when you do the right thing.

He wrote:

"To fear the world we have organized and led for three-quarters of a century, to abandon the ideals we have advanced around the globe, to refuse the obligations of international leadership for the sake of some half-baked, spurious nationalism cooked up by people who would rather find scapegoats than to solve problems is unpatriotic."

Here McCain encourages us to stay involved in the world, to work together with other people, to spend less time looking for people to blame and more time looking for solutions and ways to make our country and our world better for everyone.

He wrote:

"We don't build walls to freedom and opportunity, we tear them down."

This line probably has more than one meaning but surely one of them must be referring to the issue of undocumented immigration to the United States.

I think McCain is suggesting here that we should treat people coming to our borders, and the undocumented immigrants who already live here, with honor and respect. They are, after all, just like us, our brothers and our sisters who are seeking freedom and safety and prosperity for themselves and our children just as we do.

Maybe it is impossible to take all these people in, but even if that is so, there is no reason to hate them, or to be angry with them, or to fear them. Even if we have to turn them away there is nothing to prevent us from wishing them well, and treating them well.

And maybe the image of tearing down walls to freedom and opportunity means that we need to start working with countries like Guatemala and Honduras and El Salvador to find mutually beneficial ways to help them become more prosperous and safe so the good people who live there don't need to leave their homes to find hope.

Maybe I am wrong about my interpretations here. John McCain was a Republican and I am a Democrat so I am sure we would have disagreed on many issues. But I feel certain that one part of McCain's vision was that the United States should always be a country where people respect each other enough to talk and to argue, to fight for what they believe in but to still find ways to compromise so that everyone in the country can all move forward together.

John McCain is gone. Let's hope his vision will never die.

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[This was Senator McCain's last book. A good chance to get to know a fallen hero. If you read it before I do please send me a review I can publish here.]

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Copyright © 2018 by Joseph Wayne Gadway