Bob Herbert is leaving the New York Times after eighteen years. His last column is a good one. I liked this part:
The U.S. has not just misplaced its priorities. When the most powerful country ever to inhabit the earth finds it so easy to plunge into the horror of warfare but almost impossible to find adequate work for its people or to properly educate its young, it has lost its way entirely.
Nearly 14 million Americans are jobless and the outlook for many of them is grim. Since there is just one job available for every five individuals looking for work, four of the five are out of luck. Instead of a land of opportunity, the U.S. is increasingly becoming a place of limited expectations. A college professor in Washington told me this week that graduates from his program were finding jobs, but they were not making very much money, certainly not enough to think about raising a family.
There is plenty of economic activity in the U.S., and plenty of wealth. But like greedy children, the folks at the top are seizing virtually all the marbles. Income and wealth inequality in the U.S. have reached stages that would make the third world blush. As the Economic Policy Institute has reported, the richest 10 percent of Americans received an unconscionable 100 percent of the average income growth in the years 2000 to 2007, the most recent extended period of economic expansion.
Americans behave as if this is somehow normal or acceptable. It shouldn’t be, and didn’t used to be.
For eighteen years, Bob Herbert told the truth in a paper that did not always live up to that high standard. He was surrounded by liars like William Safire, gossips like Maureen Dowd, egomaniacs like Tom Friedman, second rate hacks like David Brooks, and neurotics like Ross Douthat. Herbert probably got less attention than any of them. He wasn’t a natural self-promoter, and he didn’t throw bombs for the sake of drawing attention to himself. His columns could be pedestrian and predictable, but they were consistently accurate and principled, and that’s why his voice will be missed even if he was barely heard above the cacophony of stupid that surrounded him.
I hope the New York Times has the integrity to replace him with someone just as honest and just as unapologetically liberal. We have too few of those kinds of folks in our national conversation.
