I compose this in an anxious moment. I and the world await President Biden’s decision whether to run for reelection. I don’t think he should – not because he isn’t a good man who’s done a good job and, surrounded by capable lieutenants, would manage America ably in a second term. I’d just rather to say goodbye to Biden than to America. His opponent’s a Godzilla who promises to trash America and all we’ve stood for. And a rickety old man who can’t talk straight is less likely to prevail than a younger, stronger champion. In my dreams I plead with President Biden to see the light. William Carlos Williams’ famous poem keeps playing in my brain:

Yes – so much depends, Mr. President – on you! Go in glory, go in peace, but go!

This panic – for it is that – sets fire to my thoughts. Why Biden’s stubbornness? Can’t he see himself in the mirror – or the video screen? Does he really believe he’s the strongest candidate? Or does he believe, like his opponent, his fate matters more than the nation’s he’s supposed to serve?

Even if he decides right eventually, already he has taken too long. Hesitation indicts. It’s like that old Jack Benny routine – “Your money or your life?” Benny’s character, a notorious skinflint, isn’t so sure. Biden’s being asked, “Your country or your career?”

Americans feel contempt for their government because our elected leaders, even the best, behave contemptibly, setting self above service, clinging to offices from which they should have crept in shame. Not just Trump but countless miscreants, when convicted by fellow citizens, decry their prosecutions as persecution. A culprit U.S. Senator insists gold bars he hid at home were an innocent rainy-day stash. I mean, really! Has honor gone the way of LP’s, script and spats?

Pummeled by deplorable examples we grow inured to our leaders’ indecency. “All that is left to us,” groaned Abraham Heschel, during an earlier nadir, “is our being horrified at the loss of our sense of horror.” Is there nobody in office who will do what’s right because it is right? If all claims are lies, all news fake, all participants crooks, why bother voting – or even caring: to hell with the lot of them. Give the keys to some swaggering two-bit punk, what difference can it make?

America is ready for spiritual revival, leaders we can believe in. We need a new broom to sweep clean, even at the price of worthy incumbents. We crave the invigoration of an ideal, that we the people stand for something noble, not just more for me. No one enjoys wallowing in the mire of “double haters” – folks who recoil from both their Presidential choices. We want to feel pride in our nation, because our nation is ourselves.

It may be the Biden crisis has resolved itself by the time you read these words. Let’s hope. The spiritual crisis, though, awaits. To change America we must change our minds. We must put we the people ahead of me and mine. We must do more than stand each other, we must stand for. Our world needs us to. We need to, for our self-respect.

A crucial choice faces us: can self-governance succeed in complex modernity or must we bow to the masters of money and might? Do you and I matter? Do we care?

“Indifference to me is the epitome of evil,” wrote that poet of the Holocaust, Eli Wiesel. “The opposite of love is not hate: it’s indifference.”