Over the years, I have written several SIGMA editorials regarding our national mission. Sadly for long-time SIGMA readers, I am about to write yet another "Mission" editorial.

Historically, the people of the United States have identified themselves in terms of a national mission. We were conceived as much a movement as a nation, and have always had a high-sounding purpose to focus our democracy and unite our people. In the 18th century, our mission, as defined by the Declaration of Independence, was to establish a new nation based on the radical notions that "all ... are created equal, and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights" and that governments derive "their powers from the consent of the governed." Even at the beginning, we saw the creation of the United States as the opening act in a global play -- as Thomas Paine said in his pamphlet Common Sense, "The cause of America is in great measure the cause of all mankind."

In the 19th century, our nation’s mission was two-fold. First, as summed up in Lincoln’s Gettysburg address, we needed to answer for the world the question "whether ... any nation so conceived and so dedicated [to the proposition that all are created equal] can long endure." Our second, and somewhat less noble, mission of the 19th century was to unite the lands between the Atlantic and Pacific into a single country (manifest destiny).

In the 20th century, our mission, as articulated by Woodrow Wilson, was to "make the world safe for democracy" by defeating all the totalitarian regimes of the century, from Nazism to Communism. Although we still have some "mopping up" to do in this regard, we enter the 21st century having accomplished most of our mission objectives.

What about the 21st century? Is there a mission for the United States that is as compelling, as unifying, as the missions of centuries past? I think there is one emerging, one which the politicians are not yet comfortable in articulating, but one which the country is nonetheless beginning to embark upon. That mission? Create a world civilization that will last forever.

In creating a world civilization, I am not referring to a world government. The ancient Greeks had an identifiable civilization, even though the Greeks governed themselves through autonomous city-states. What defined the Greek civilization was their common culture, values and belief system. Similarly, we can have a world civilization composed of autonomous nations, yet united with a common political process (democracy), a common economic system (free enterprise), common values (a belief in human rights) and common culture (hopefully, something better than the "McWorld" that is currently spreading around the world).

Getting the global civilization to last forever, however, is the hard part. There have been nearly global civilizations in the past (Rome, for example), but they all fell. Political pressures build up until revolution occurs, population growth and resource depletion causes a slow decline, inequities between nations lead to war and conquest, or rogue despots create international instability. For one or more of these reasons, all past civilizations have died. The great American challenge for the 21st century is to further develop our institutions to avoid these problems, and demonstrate to the rest of the world it can be done.

Democracy can allow grievances between people to be resolved without conflict. This, however, presupposes that democracy continues to function. There are many indicators that the great American experiment in democracy may be failing, not because of hostility, but because of cynicism and indifference. Restoring trust in democracy, honor to public service, vigorous public debate and involvement in the process is essential to democracy’s survival.

Our economic system has demonstrated an ability to meet individual’s material needs in a way unrivaled by any other system. The question is whether it can continue to do so forever. The high-sounding concept of "Sustainable Development" is really an effort to make capitalism eternal, to allow the benefits of free enterprise to be enjoyed generation after generation.

Making free enterprise an international economic system is essential to eliminate the economic differences that lead to world instability. NAFTA, GATT, our response to the Asian currency crisis, the internationalization of business, etc. are all manifestations of this part of our national mission.

Finally, the world needs some form of protection against the occasional rogue leader that can disrupt stability of global civilization. Currently, this is being handled on an ad hoc basis, as is the case in Iraq. This will not work forever. If we are to succeed in our 21st century mission, we must come up with a better way.

It is interesting that, while the U.S. appears to have a mission for the 21st century, our political leaders are afraid to articulate it. We need a Jefferson, a Lincoln, a Wilson to state our mission and inspire the commitment of our people. Where is a national leader of sufficient stature and honesty to articulate our 21st century mission and lead us toward its accomplishment? The current occupant of the White House fails to meet these requirements. As citizens, our first duty of the 21st century will be to find and elect a leader that does measure up to the task.

Our first event at GA this year is our biennial business meeting, which will be on Monday, June 29th from 1:30 pm to 2:45 pm in the Wilmorite Room at the Hyatt Hotel.

* Probably the most "official" registry of members of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy is the National Press Directory for Conservatives, which is published by the Media Research Center. SIGMA has been included since 1991. So I fully expect to be dragged off in chains if the Administration decides to "bring down" the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy!

Like many of you, I finished listening to President Clinton's statement concerning Iraq and was reminded of what Thoreau said at the time of the Mexican War: "Blessed are the children, for they have not read the President's message."

Many Unitarian Universalists will oppose the use of military force. For many in our family of faith, such opposition is a matter of consistency and conscience. Like conscientious objectors in other eras, such opponents of militarism deserve our respect and support.

Unlike Quakers and other religious communities committed to a consistent peace witness, Unitarian Universalism also includes many individuals who believe that military force is sometimes, sadly, necessary. I am one such person.

In recent decades three Unitarian Universalists have served as U.S. Secretary of Defense -- Elliott Richardson, William Perry, and now, William Cohen. Those who take on such daunting responsibilities also deserve our respect and support, as do all the men and women who serve in our military.

The crisis in Iraq seems to me like a police hostage crisis. Saddam Hussein holds innocent men, women and children within his country, along with weapons of mass destruction dangerous not only to them, but to the entire neighborhood and to the world community.

I do not ask every Unitarian Universalist to think alike in this complex matter. I do ask that we maintain the bonds of love and respect within our family of faith and in every public discussion. May freedom of conscience, reasoned discussion, and tolerance of differing perspectives be the method by which we teach one another to be persons of moral character and spiritual leadership. And may we serve, each in our own way, that world of justice and peace for which we all yearn, together.

As one might gather from the above quotation, Frank Lloyd Wright was no fan of the modern city. He believed that the city had grown to such monstrous proportions by 1958 that it was suffocating the spirit of those who dwelled within. He foresaw that, if we continued to expand cities and suburbs without limit, the quality of life in our society would suffer.

Today, U.S. cities are self-destructing. Looking out my office window in central Detroit, I see a dead city -- decaying infrastructure, boarded-up or deserted buildings, crime and poverty. The suburbs surrounding the city are tied to it with concrete arteries: in spite of the wealth of the suburbs, the cancers destroying the city are metastasizing into the suburbs. Crime, drugs and valuelessness are creeping into the suburbs: those who fled the city out of fear are once again fearful.

There is an old adage that goes, "Generals always plan to win the last war." Like those generals, the social engineering elites of this country are trying to "save" the cities by focusing on what they see to be the evil that is destroying our cities -- freedom of mobility. In essence, the social engineers are trying to limit transportation and land development (they call it "urban sprawl") in a hopeless effort to return the city to an idealized past.

Unfortunately, what today’s social engineers do not recognize is what Frank Lloyd Wright knew instinctively -- the city is not a particularly uplifting or desirable place to live! Outside of a few certifiable New Yorkers, few if any people really want to live cheek-to-jowl with millions of neighbors.

Cities date from the human discovery of agriculture. Once nomads started to plant crops, they had to stay around until harvest. Staying put in one place, however, exposed the former nomads to attack. By huddling together behind walls at night and during attacks, the new farmers could survive until harvest. As European cities developed, they retained this model -- to this day, farmers work the fields in the day and come home to live in the city at night.

With the industrial revolution, the purpose of the city evolved from protection to production. Factories required large numbers of workers and customers within reach of the existing transportation system. Further, achieving economies of scale in production required LARGE cities.

In the 5,000+ year history of cities, however, there is little to suggest that people actually like living in them. As the transportation system became mechanized, first with transit and then automobiles, people tried to get as far away from the city as possible. But there are limits -- people still must commute to a central location each day to work, play and consume.

Now, for the first time in the history of cities, this may be changing. As more and more work involves not the production of physical products but the production and movement of information and ideas, it is no longer necessary for everyone to convene to a central location to work. The telephone, computer and Internet have made it possible for people to work together while separated by great distances.

The Boeing 777 jetliner, for example, was engineered entirely in a computer by design teams spread across the globe. Here in Detroit, the major automakers are racing to do the same with cars, so that car designs can be developed around-the-clock. The vision is that, as Detroit engineers log off their computers for the day and head for an evening of culture at the Canadian ballet, their counterparts in Japan, just getting up, will log on. As the Japanese engineers hit the Karaoke bars at the end of a hard day, engineers in Germany will have just finished their morning strudel and are firing up the old computer. And, when its Heineken time in Frankfurt, the Detroit team is ready to start a new day.

In this vision of the world, it really won’t matter where you live. And, when this vision becomes reality, how many people will prefer to live on Manhattan, and how many will chose to live on an acre or two near a small town in a scenic part of America? How many will want to live in an economically and socially diverse city, and how many will chose to live in a rural community with people like themselves? And if people are totally free to choose where to live and with whom, is this bad? And, even if it is bad, can it be stopped?

We are doing whatever we can to make it difficult for suburbanites to commute to their jobs in the central city, under the naive assumption that people will either use mass-transit or move into the city. In reality, we are causing the opposite to happen -- either forcing the jobs to migrate to the suburbs or the suburbanites into telecommuting and exurbia.

Our public policy is laboring under a false premise -- increasingly, the center of civilization is not the city with its skyscrapers and teaming millions. Rather, the new center of civilization is a 18"x18"x7" beige plastic box on a shelf in an office building in Herndon, VA. (population 12,000). This box is the "A" root-server, the electronic heart of the Internet. Today, 100 million people are connected through the system run by this box: in a few years, that number is expected to grow to 1 billion. Increasingly, these people are working, consuming and playing through this system. This is their city.

Answer: At conferences in each of those three cities, a politician compromised the cause of Western civilization, and sparked a conflict that would drag on for years and cost the world untold suffering and billions of dollars.

In Munich, Germany in 1938, representatives of England, Italy and France met with Adolf Hitler to discuss Hitler’s demand for part of Czechoslovakia. The delegation, led by Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain (a British Unitarian, interestingly enough), agreed to let Hitler take the land and the people he wanted in exchange for a promise of no further Nazi aggression. Chamberlain returned home to England a hero, proclaiming "I have secured peace in our time." In reality, what Chamberlain had done was to demonstrate to Hitler that England and France did not have the will or resolve to stop the Nazis, thus provoking World War II. The "peace" Chamberlain’s cowardice secured lasted less than a year, and the war that followed cost 50,000,000 lives.

In Yalta, USSR in 1945, a dying Franklin Roosevelt joined British Prime Minister Winston Churchill (Chamberlain’s successor) and Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin in a conference to determine the shape of the post-war world. While Churchill insisted that the West needed to stand firm against what he believed to be the expansionist dreams of Stalin, Roosevelt did not have the physical or emotional resolve to support Churchill. As a result, Europe was partitioned, and the Iron Curtain descended upon the people of Eastern Europe. The Cold War between east and west began, and lasted until Ronald Reagan brought down the Berlin Wall in 1989. Not only money but lives were lost in the Cold War: the U.S. fought in both Korea and Viet Nam, and the world suffered immeasurably.

This summer, the U.S. Senate, which ultimately must ratify the Kyoto treaty, voted 95 - 0 (a vote that can hardly be characterized as partisan) on a resolution instructing U.S. negotiators not to come back with a treaty unless all countries were required to take meaningful control measures. The Senate realized, what many environmentalists do not, that unless all nations participate in this treaty, the economies of the West will wither and die, while countries like China (that will not have to curtail energy use) will grow and eventually dominate the world economy. The stakes in this debate are that high.

After the Senate resolution, the Administration changed the leader of our negotiating team to a tough economist, Larry Summers. It appeared that, rather the agree to a bad treaty that would not meet the Senate requirements (and make the U.S. economy second-rate), Summers would rather there be no treaty at all. At that point, Vice President Gore flew to Japan and, in a televised speech designed to please his environmentalist and overseas supporters, Gore chastised the U.S. negotiators and instructed them to "be more flexible." As a consequence, the U.S. negotiators caved, and the resulting Kyoto treaty is everything the U.S. Senate told negotiators not to bring home.

So why did Vice President Al Gore negotiate a deal in Kyoto that is, in all likelihood, against America’s interests? I believe the answer involves equal measures of naiveté, angst and desperation.

Clearly, the Vice President is extremely naive when it comes to international diplomacy. He failed to recognize the most fundamental aspect of the Kyoto treaty -- for the next hundred years, at least, the treaty’s impact will be economic, not environmental. No honest scientist or environmentalist can predict that compliance with the terms of the Kyoto treaty will result in any noticeable change in the global climate during the lifetimes of anyone reading this article or beyond. On the other hand, many prominent economists recognize that Gore’s treaty will have tremendous adverse economic consequences in the developed nations, particularly the United States. Unfortunately for us, although Gore failed to grasp this truth, other nations at the negotiating table understood it all to well.

Vice President Gore is also torn by the liberal angst that, in nearly everything, the U.S. is evil. He feels the environmentalists guilt that the U.S. enjoys a high standard of living and consumes a lot. As a result, he fell for the developing countries argument that the U.S. should suffer in the future as punishment for living so well in the past.

Finally, there is the element of desperation. Gore desperately wants to be President in 2000. Unfortunately, he is part of an Administration that rivals that of Warren G. Harding in terms of corruption -- some of which Gore willingly participated in. He needs some noble-sounding issue to distract voters from his many ignoble qualities that would otherwise disqualify him from becoming the most powerful person on earth. He also needs campaign dollars, and the pipeline that allegedly connects the Democratic National Committee to several of the biggest beneficiaries of the Kyoto treaty as written -- Indonesia and China -- may still be open and flowing $$$ in the year 2000.

How much the Vice President’s naiveté, angst and desperation will cost the U.S. in the centuries ahead, we do not know. The ill-advised Kyoto treaty may hopefully never be ratified by the U.S. Senate. Another President, someone with "Dutch" Reagan’s backbone, may yet turn this situation around. But if the treaty stands as is, and is eventually ratified by the U.S. Senate, then the future for our children and grandchildren is grim.

As we watch our government struggle over the issue of what to do about Iraq and extending our commitment in Bosnia, the question of why the U.S. is police force for the world is often brought up. We are the world’s police force for a very simple reason: it is the only way to secure our peace and safety.

During the Cold War, nations of the world had a choice: do it the Soviet Union’s way or do it the United States’ way. Smaller nations were well aware that making themselves visible by being a haven for terrorism was a good way to get unwelcome attention from the nearest superpower. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the half of the world under Soviet domination suddenly found the freedom the other half had long enjoyed. Unfortunately, many of these newly-freed nations are now making headlines with the misuse of their freedom. These unsteady governments have access to nuclear weapons (along side conventional weapons) from the inventories of the old Soviet Union, and they have these weapons in quantities that would have been previously unthinkable.

As the remaining superpower, only the United States has a military force with a worldwide presence. No other military regularly stations its troops within the borders of so many foreign powers. These nations allow us to base our troops on their soil in the expectation that we will help protect them from outside threats (unlike WW I and WW II, where we waited until after these nations were decimated before we joined the conflict). It is in our nation’s interest to keep this strong overseas presence to keep petty dictators from thinking that they have a chance to harm us or our allies and to keep a close eye on weaponry that could someday be used against us.

While our current military spending appalls many liberals, how much worse would the national debt become if a biological weapon was released in one of our large cities, or a terrorist’s nuclear missile found its way home***? The price of liberty has always come high, and a brief examination of world history shows us the folly when a nation rises to greatness and then relaxes its vigilance. Take ancient Rome as a classic example: Roman citizenry grew too comfortable and lazy to fight in or support their armies, leaving mercenaries and barbarian soldiers to guard the gates. The result? A dark age that lasted a millennium.

As a nation, we need to accept the responsibilities placed on our shoulders and use our influence to make the world a better and safer place (Isn’t this what Unitarian Universalists dream of doing?). But our influence is not just talk and ideas -- King Arthur once had the remarkable idea that force could be used to protect the weak and champion the causes of right and justice. We should recognize that our current military strength is one of the greatest powers in the world for doing good, if we would just accept the necessity of using it.