Tuesday
For those unsettled by the Biden administration’s stumbles in Afghanistan, it worth recalling that all administrations make mistakes. The question is how well they respond to those mistakes and how much they learn from them. Franklin D. Roosevelt alluded to Dante when dealing with his own stumbles.
The occasion was the president receiving his party’s go-ahead to run for a second term of office. Roosevelt’s first four years had not been entirely smooth sailing: although unemployment had dropped from its 1932 high, when a fourth of its citizens were unemployed, the economy was still not back on track. Roosevelt acknowledged this in his acceptance speech but then gave voters another way to think about things:
Governments can err, Presidents do make mistakes, but the immortal Dante tells us that divine justice weighs the sins of the cold-blooded and the sins of the warm-hearted in different scales.
Better the occasional faults of a Government that lives in a spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a Government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.
Then, in lines which you’ve probably heard, he invoked a spirit of civic responsibility
There is a mysterious cycle in human events. To some generations much is given. Of other generations much is expected. This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.
In Dante’s Inferno, the deepest levels of hell are reserved for those who cold-bloodedly betray their friends. A three-headed Satan sits encased in ice in the fourth ring of the ninth circle, and in each of his mouths he holds the lowest of the low: Judas, who of course betrayed Jesus, and Cassius and Brutus, who betrayed Julius Caesar.
By contrast, there are many souls in Purgatory who, although they did bad things while alive, had enough warm love within them to escape Inferno. While politicians are seldom saints bound directly for Paradiso, there are many who take seriously the difficulties of their constituents and do what they can to ameliorate their suffering.
I saw a liberal commentator asked the other day why he is harder on Trump’s administration than on Biden’s. The reason, he said, is because in Biden he sees someone who is doing his best for the people he serves. Like Roosevelt, he may make mistakes, but he is guided by a spirit of charity. Trump, by contrast, didn’t give a damn about the American public, caring only for himself. “Frozen in the ice of his own indifference” is a good description.
The difference between the empathetic and the self-absorbed is the difference between Purgatory and Inferno.