One issue lies at the heart of this election. The pundits call it the economy, but it’s really about social and economic justice. What America has become under eight years of George III and the Republican Counterrevolution is not a city on a hill whose values shine like a beacon of equity and justice but the equivalent of a gated community which only a privileged few may enter.

Even as the economy slides towards a depression, the tilted playing field that represents George W. Bush’s legacy has become a precipice that even the skilled, the well-equipped and the lucky find it all but impossible to succeed in climbing.  If you are an immigrant, a person of color or just an innocent victim of a layoff, an unexpected health care bill, a mortgage foreclosure, you carry a weight that makes that precipice all but impossible to climb.

When Dr. King constantly evoked the metaphor of climbing a mountain to describe the struggle to reach the dream he described standing in the shadow of Abraham Lincoln and looking out across the stilled waters of the reflecting pool towards George Washington’s obelisk, he knew that the struggle to reach social and economic justice would be arduous, but not even Dr. King could have imagined that in eight years a President would make it an Everest, its summit so high that many days we can not even see it, let alone reach it.

Dr. King would not have predicted that we have not moved forward but slid backwards so that the social and economic justice for which he fought has taken us back a century, to the era of tycoons, less government, no income taxes, and separate but equal. So less than a week before the election we lie huddled on that mountain Dr. King evoked, a storm raging around us that threatens to blow us off the place where we huddle uncertainly, barely sustained by faith in our system and our institutions.

At this time, in this place the only statistics and charts that really matter are personal. Not in the egotistical way of me-first or even the much-misunderstood idea of American individualism, but because with the storm swirling around us it has all but obscured any big picture, distorted the voices that loudly offer answers, and obscured any sense of where we are and how to navigate through this crisis.

So all we can do is to take stock in our own situation, tallying up where we are, where we were and where we expected to be. We don’t need the pundits to tell us how bad things are because we can look at our own bank statements, the for sale signs dotting our neighborhoods and the balloon payments due on our mortgages. We can look at our schools, the condition of our roads and bridges, the cash register total at the grocery store. We can lie awake in the darkness and know the uneasy sleep that comes with the fear of a layoff, a serious illness, the pressure of trying to give our kids a college education, the gnawing guilt that the world our children will inherit will not be as pleasant as the one our parents willed to us.

Our accounting is not merely economic but moral for we know that this crisis is less about the Dow Jones, unemployment statistics and the GNP than it is about the loss of principle.

We know greed has always lurked in shadowy corners of our minds and always comes clothed in fabric woven from venerable threads that predate any sacred tablet entwined with the latest hot trends, the must-haves of the moment. All of us sense this crisis is about more than greed, it is about the loss of that moral compass that helped us to navigate the storms of what we nostalgically refer to as the American Century.

Woodrow Wilson held that compass when he said, “Justice, and only justice shall always be our motto.” Al Smith held that compass when he said, “Nothing un-American can live in the sunlight.” Franklin Roosevelt held that compass when he said it was time “to once more put our faith in the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid.” Harry Truman held that compass when he said, “The welfare of the whole people should always come first.” John Kennedy held that compass when he said, “The rights of every man are diminished when the rights of one man are threatened.”

As we cast out ballots it is those words that should resonate in our heads. As your eyes navigate down the columns of names we should ask which of them truly offers a chance to recover the principles that inspired that rhetoric. We all know what America has become and what it should be. So who offers to narrow that gap between dream and reality, principle and actuality? Who is visionary enough to see how the chasms that have opened  between us might be bridged? Who will again act to restore the principle of the level playing field that lies behind the words of those who lead us through the American Century.

For all of us it is time to cast aside the bitterness and cynicism of the Era of Bad Feelings and trust again in ourselves. For if nothing else comes from this contentious election I hope we recover that moral compass, our commitment to the level playing field and our faith in each other.

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