A Chorus of Demands

By Hugh Sidey

Modesty is not a requirement for becoming President. Thus did Democratic Contender Walter Mondale a while back declare without blushing that he was ready for the job, something no mere human can ever be. Ronald Reagan keeps insisting he is not all that burdened by presidential responsibilities. Would that he worried more.

Jimmy Carter suggested that he might have greatness in him, a quality that historians have not yet detected. Lyndon Johnson once looked into the face of a young black admirer and told friends later that he could tell the lad felt he was in the presence of "the Lord God Almighty." L.B.J. proved all too mortal.

Yet we never tire of listening and hoping. So perhaps it was a natural out growth of our own fervent mythmaking that the great march in Washington a fortnight ago hinged its new agenda on the defeat of Ronald Reagan. Get a new man in the White House, the 300,000 people seemed to say, and the desires of 700 disparate marching organizations -- whether they be chiefly concerned with black progress, gay rights, women's issues, environmental problems, unemployment or nuclear war -- will be instantly gratified. How splendidly simple; how cruel to themselves.

In fact, most of those people, a remarkable number of whom were festooned with Minolta cameras and crowned with Sony Walkman headsets, must have had doubts. Protest is an industry, organized, priced, packaged and advertised, for maximum impact, on the Capitol Mall. Since the rhetoric of campaign politics portrays the President-to-be as a supercolossal wizard for everything that anybody ever wanted, it is logical that the protest industry should focus blame on him for everything that anybody couldn't get.

The reality is that the President, no matter who he may be, is only one force in a very large and cantankerous world. Indeed, even as the park custodians were cleaning up the Mall after the march, the U.S. Census Bureau reported that in the previous twelve months world population climbed 82.1 million, the largest gain in the history of this weary globe. In the view of Lester Brown of Worldwatch Institute, which monitors global stress, population is the most awesome problem. Masses of people shouldering each other for food, space, wealth and dignity are at the root of most wars. Nothing was said about this down on the Mall.

Nor were any speeches devoted to the breakup of the black family, as much a cause of black poverty as anything else, plunging children into ignorance and crime, so far thwarting many efforts to improve the quality of their lives. Hardly a word was uttered about the obsolescence of heavy American industry, the spread of high technology and the growth of overseas competition, which together have cost thousands of Americans their jobs. Despite their claim to be a "Coalition of Conscience," the marchers on the Mall were not proposing to restrain their demands in favor of less fortunate groups or even to work for something we used to call the national interest.

More than 20 years ago, there was another speaker whose voice echoed from the other end of the Washington Mall. John Kennedy urged Americans to consider first what they could do for their country, not what the country could do for them.

The protest industry has its time and place, but one suspects that the dreams of the great march will never be fulfilled if the people who possess them believe the man in the White House can do it all. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.