Up Front

with the Editor

I don’t know a Mr. Reg Barry, who lives in Mt. Waverley in the Australian State of Victoria, but what he had to say about America recently in a letter to an Australian national newspaper deserves wider circulation. By which I mean, naturally, that I agree with the main view of the writer.

Mr. Barry said in his letter to The Australian in September that he had just returned from a long visit to the United States and he found that Australian newspapers were still “pounding the drum with dire warn ings about Australia doing this or that, and holding up America and the horrible example of the con sequences”.

Mr. Barry continued: “Certainly, there is much that is wrong, frighten ing and dangerous in American society today, and there are great and pressing problems yet to be resolved.

“There have been American actions and policies which are quite in defensible, the tragic effects of which will take many years to offset. But, for all their inexperience and short comings, the American people are probably the most self-analytical and self-critical in the world, and beneath all the ills which they so readily admit and publicise, lies an energy and determination to probe, confront and put to rights.

“Theirs is a seething society in which new ideas and trends are tried out, accepted or discarded, and their failures are paraded just as much as their successes.

“Our own national philosophy of life is quite the reverse. It is one of narrow conservatism and mass stagnation. Do nothing and we can’t be wrong; try nothing and no mis takes are possible. Drift, and we can’t be blamed for taking the wrong course.

“By all means let us learn from America’s errors. But just rejecting courses of action without doing something else positive ourselves to

overcome problems is both dishonest and hypocritical.”

I spent a fascinating two weeks in America in August. It was my first visit. Although I was there with a team of aviation writers as guest of American Airlines, and thus spent a goodly portion of my time looking at aviation installations in New York, Texas and Oklahoma, I nevertheless came away from the United States with the opinion that the Americans are having a rough deal at home that they don’t entirely deserve.

Furthermore, that the rest of the world can’t afford to sell America short.

As Mr. Barry says, Americans parade their failures as much as their successes; they are the most self analytical and self-critical in the world.

Americans can be

too self-critical

If they are to be criticised it’s because they are overly self-critical.

Those Americans I met in my quick visit to five states insisted on parad ing America’s problems, and I found them unnecessarily despondent about the future.

Certainly their big cities are over crowded, particularly with blacks from the southern states with no jobs, attracted north because the welfare handouts are more generous. And the overcrowding and lack of educa tion have meant an explosion in the crime rate, so that whole areas of New York and Washington are not safe after dark.

There is pollution, and escalating

living costs, and ridiculously high medical costs (for which, it seems to me, the greediness of the American medical profession must be blamed).

Americans are suffering from lack of social and financial security, and are not at all sure that the politicians can relieve the situation.

So many of the people I spoke to questioned me wistfully about Australia, which they were inclined to see as a New Frontier, a new West which offered the freedom and the open space which America had lost.

And Australia is a new West. Its big cities and some selected slices of its outback are invigorating, almost electric with motion. There is bright-eyed optimism, not depression. (The “narrow conservatism and mass stagnation” that Mr. Barry speaks of doesn’t describe the Australia I know, although it may possibly be a very good description of his own particular neighbourhood).

But Americans can’t contract out of the American civilisation. They can’t all desert the great American continent for a new American dream in Australia—even though many of them have already done it, and others will undoubtedly follow.

On this point I agree entirely with Mr. Barry’s sentiments. America is a great nation which has fallen on hard times. But it will come good.

Americans are intelligent, resilient, resourceful. They’ll find a way.

But their new emergence won’t be quick or without further pain, and in the meantime my first visit to the United States has shown me that, at this point in history, Sydney is the place to live and bring up my children.

Stuart Inder