Somebody in the coffee shop asked what I thought about the Nov. 2 presidential election. I said it might be the most critical in the country’s history. The man drinking latte thought that was a stretch.

I said I didn’t know why it should be. The country is at a crossroads of conscience and purpose. Millions of people in this country clearly read its gropings that way and see America drifting aimlessly in a destructive misuse of its great power and wealth. While the American government is reaching for some kind of misbegotten world dominance and incurring growing fear and contempt around the world, it is deepening the chasm between the privileged and the struggling in America, in opportunity, in health care and in school.

It is not the America we like to revere when we sing “America the Beautiful.”

A day later my car radio lapsed into merciful silence somewhere after the news from Iraq and the latest from “American Idol.” What I heard next was a public service announcement about poverty, and I remembered the conversation in the coffee shop.

I turned up the volume. The announcer spoke of 34 million people living in poverty, and I was jolted. He wasn’t talking about worldwide poverty. What he was describing was poverty in America.

This wasn’t about reducing historic poverty in Africa, Asia, South America and elsewhere in the developing world, a subject on which my wife and I had written a book. This was closer. I’d heard the numbers before, but numbers whirl around your head when they identify the multitudes of the poor and the invisible. The invisible man in this announcement was an American. Maybe he was born on a farm in Kansas or on the south side of Chicago. Maybe he was born in Mexico. It doesn’t matter. He and 34 million others like him live in this country, the richest in world history.

That radio spot wasn’t intended to be partisan political stuff. We’ve been hearing those call-to-action announcements for years. But poverty in bountiful America today is expanding inexcusably. So are the millions of so-called ordinary Americans who are being stranded when the express trains of privilege, Pentagon spending and greed leave the gate.

Consider the word “poverty.” We use it to characterize the truly poor because it is convenient and truthful. But we use it so often that the word alone can anesthetize us from the raw ugliness of what it means. Poverty means more than being poor. It means pain. It means humiliation. It means the indescribable agony, in the poorest countries, of watching one’s child die of starvation. In America it means doors shut in your face, being ridiculed or pitied, worried about having feelings that don’t seem to matter to others, trying to make people understand that not everybody who is poor is dumb or lazy or ready to steal.

Added to these in America today there are those ordinary millions who are not counted among the 34 million in poverty because they have assets. But they are assets now dwindling dramatically at a rate that will make it impossible for millions of them to receive adequate health care. These are people who have lived useful and responsible lives. But they are being squeezed by a dogmatic economics of massive tax cuts that have insulated the wealthy and produced deficits so huge as to put the richest country on earth on the road to disaster unless its people wake up in time to demand a change in direction.

A lot of those ordinary people will die prematurely because the American government today has crafted a partnership with the most powerful corporate forces in the country to create a colossus that rules the market place, decides the cost of medicine, and who will profit from war.

It has created a willful hierarchy of corporate free-booters, Wall Street manipulators, media camp followers and political buccaneers with a slash and burn mentality when confronting political opposition. The strategy is to blow off dissenters and critics, and those ordinary Americans who are finally getting wise, by defining them as wimps, non-patriots, obsolete liberals and probably warmed over communists. In all of this the power brokers are buoyed by ruthlessly gerrymandered congressional districts and an alliance with a militant army of Christian fundamentalists, many of who regard themselves as de facto apostles of the pure-and-only ordained faith. These are among the players who now control the federal government and who are changing not only the character of the government but its purposes.

Its purpose internationally is to run the world where America once led the world. Its rationale for this purpose is to protect the liberty of American citizens.

While the Bush government is saying this, it is subverting the liberty of American citizens with its secrecy and hidden agendas that are charted largely by unelected ideologues.

Its purpose domestically is to enhance corporate power so unalterably that decades of past bipartisan efforts, in the direction of fairness and regulation to protect the country’s resources and the voiceless, will dry up for lack of funding.

It’s happening today.

The subsurface scheming is bad enough. What aggravates it is an incompetence and bungling so gross that it has made the American government an international cartoon. Yet it is one that is not very amusing. The government’s blunders and arrogance have caused thousands of needless deaths, including hundreds in its own services, and destabilized the country’s economic apparatus. That is not an easy accomplishment.

The country is losing its way. The America that threatens to vanish in front of our eyes is the one most of us idealized as kids when we recited the pledge of allegiance. We also admired the subsequent America that arose when we used its wealth and energy in a way that matched the country’s emerging greatness after World War II. It was then when the country tried to right its wrongs socially and racially, to confront its prejudices, to be proud of its emerging diversity and to spread our enormous financial and human resources to create what we hoped would be a great society.

We fell short by miles and experienced turmoil and divisions because of the excesses. But it was also a time of cleansing, and what resulted was a better America, one where hope was not now confined to the middle class and the wealthy. We gave prodigiously, individually, corporately and by vote. We did not weaken ourselves by giving. We made ourselves more principled and respected. In many ways we shot for the stars: we said everyone should have a chance in the classroom and the health of the poorest was as important as the health of the wealthiest or the mightiest.

We no longer have that illusion because, increasingly, we can’t afford it. We can’t afford it because we are now committed to what appears to be a perpetual state of war, against somebody or something, an unending state of tension in our lives and in the lives of billions around the world. These are people who don’t know what America wants or why, or if it can any longer be trusted to tell them the truth. They see a man in the White House who strikes them as an imposter, a man in desperate need to come before his countrymen as A War President, full of resolve and grimness and images constructed by his handlers.

And all of this sucks up billions upon billions of dollars without silencing the calls from the White House and Congress to make those gargantuan tax cuts permanent.

There was a time when both political parties generally agreed on one of the axioms of responsible social and economic philosophy: “You can’t get quality on the cheap.”

Minnesota, where I live, was once rather famously proud of how it dealt with social services, health care and schooling needs. It wanted to be the best in the country, and often it was. If you want quality, the Democrats and Republicans both said, you have to pay for it. So Minnesota taxed itself enough to achieve that quality. Today, very few states talk about increasing taxes to meet the shrinking dollars made available by the government in Washington. A modest tax increase is going to be met by screams of anguish from the upper brackets who don’t want to lose any part of what they gained from the Bush crowd. A couple of years ago the political climate brought in a new Minnesota governor, a Republican who tries to act tough like Bush but with better PR skills, a more pronounced ability to speak grammatical English and urges to horn in on sports broadcasts. He decided to balance the budget with shell games of deferred payments and by pruning the school and health services or by poaching on federal funds intended for those services. One result is to leave the Minneapolis and St. Paul schools in deteriorating shape. Whereupon one of his allies in the Minnesota Senate, an Olympic class blowhard, denounced the city school systems. “They suck,” he said and promptly blamed the Democrats for the schools’ decline.

I don’t know if the election of John Kerry can bring the country back to where it was going. Another four years of Bush may be too much for the country to absorb. Kerry risked in Viet Nam. He needs to know that the time for risk as a presidential candidate is even graver because it involves the future of millions of Americans and perhaps the world. From John Kerry today, we don’t need four versions of reality. One will do. And if and when the country hears that, it will put Kerry in the White House.

Copyright (c) 2004 Jim Klobuchar