CITIZENSHIP IN A REPUBLIC – The arena, crucible of Democracy

April 23, 1910 - Just out of office as President of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt was touring Europe while on his way home from Africa and a historic big game hunt. This day he gave a speech at the Sorbonne (University) in Paris.

The title of his speech was “Citizenship in a Republic.”  Embedded in this remarkable dissertation on Political Science and human nature is one of T.R.’s ageless quotes:

“It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.”

We hunter conservationists of the 21^st Century endlessly heap our praises on Theodore Roosevelt as if today was 1914 instead of 2014.  And why not? Great were his ‘triumphs of high achievement.’ And many are his words of conservation wisdom still prescient today.

Reality, however, is that T.R. has been dead for 101 years and our Republic lives on, rumbling across the decades in dire need of new triumphs of high achievement that seem instead only to diminish in occurrence as our time passes. Alas, the danger of having T.R. too much with us is that some believe T.R. won the conservation battle for us, and we today need only pick the fruits of forest and stream.

My bet is that T.R.’s ghost, if he could speak now, would gruffly tell us to stop hanging out in the cheap seats blathering about his won-loss record and get our timid butts down into the arena where the battle for the future is ongoing. {He would also drop the masculine rhetorical bias of his day and shout BULLY to the presence of sister warriors and feminine champions in our modern ranks.}

Citizenship in a Republic, in other words, is a home-made, do-it-yourself proposition. The notion that “Freedom Is Not Free” applies as much to the striving of peace-time civics as it does to the sacrifices of war.

 We Americans have created for ourselves the politics we detest today. We have done this by our personal avoidance of the arena -- as if democracy can be a spectator sport. And we have done this by abdicating our citizen’s participatory duty thus giving a no-show win to the plutocratic mercenaries and resource-hungry gladiators who throng the arena. Left unbound, they game democracy to subsume the trust of public office to self-serving people.

It’s not their privilege to make this happen; it’s our fault, fellow citizens. We get the government we deserve.

In step with the central theme of Bull Moose Gazette: wild things, wild places and people who care – I offer these thoughts on democracy as viewed through the prism of natural resource conservation, wildlife management, outdoor heritage and so on.  But certainly T.R. was not so narrowly focused as he spoke before his Sorbonne audience. These civics lessons apply across the whole arena of public affairs in our American Republic.

So please read these columns in context of democracy as an arena -- and the triumphs, defeats, and consequences of what takes place in that arena.

My fundamental premise is that we American individuals can join the struggle and be citizens, or we can accept any of an assortment of would-be tyrants, some abstract others real, as our destiny. The ‘do-nothing with no-consequence’ option doesn’t exist and is simply a loser’s fantasy.

I started this discussion three columns ago with what I see as the most immediately necessary skill needed by citizens in the arena. That skill is communication -- the ability to constructively engage those other citizens with whom we find ourselves in conflict by listening to and understanding their perspective – and by explaining our own.

The second skill I described is the capacity to strike a deal with our counter-parties when a deal is the best outcome available. The word I use is ‘compromise’ but we are really talking about the art of the deal. (square, fair, new or otherwise)

I cite those two skills as of first importance because I observe conservationists and other citizens most often losing a policy decision for lack of these key abilities. But clearly much more goes into a victory in the arena; so we will have many other civic contests and their prerequisite skills to talk about as we go along.

To point the direction this ‘first-things-first’ skill discussion is headed, note that the flip side of the afore-mentioned deal-making skill is the art of deciding when to stand your ground and simply fight. This leads us into the question of power -- how to get it and how to use it.

I list this vital fighting skill only third because I observe people already in the arena using the ‘stand-your-ground’ tactic as their first and only choice for action. They make it a self-justifying crutch to avoid the hard work of communication and the hard choices of compromise. By doing so, however, they delude themselves that tyrannical consequences will not fall upon them.

And we must grasp that our most important civic forums are those in our local communities, towns, commissions and states. Win in those arenas and you will already hold the high ground when you do go to Washington.

And finally we must understand how human nature interacts with our republican political system to produce outcomes that seemingly defy logic but still go up on that big scoreboard of destiny hanging above the arena.

What we seek here is a winning game plan for a 21^st Century democratic conservation triumph to rival that of T.R. and his 19^th Century Compatriots.

Any conservation citizen who is satisfied with our current policy outcomes will find little interest in this discussion. But we know we regularly suffer losses; and we face the tyrannical outcomes of defeat - or worse - inaction on great decisions such as climate change and resource depletion.

Once again T.R. speaks to this point: “In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing.”

But our will is the triumph of high achievement though we err and come up short again and again.  We will win out for those wild places so inspiring to people and vital to wild things. We will impose our will upon the decision either to conserve or to squander the resource treasury that belongs to unborn Americans as much as to ourselves.

We will thus restore some lost virtue to citizenship in this Republic.

And we owe virtue not just to ourselves but to those wild things we hunt and the wild places they inhabit. For they have no champion other than ourselves in the arena of human dominion. We hunter conservationists are bound in a moral covenant with them that we preserve their wild kinds and we save for them wild habitats so large and so sustaining that their wild existence is secured for the future. This debt we owe in exchange for the life we take from them for our own sustenance.

But should we fail let history record, and our descendants know, we failed while daring greatly, so that our place shall not be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.

Who knows! We may end up someplace where we have to look T.R. in the eye and explain the score for our generation.

Having written at such length about citizenship in a republic I will close with a last bow to the master who reveals the essence of citizenship in only eleven syllables:

    “Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.” – T.R.

  ~~ Ron Moody