News-Record.com

Cornel West turned a catchy phrase in a talk at A&T Sunday, as reported by J. Brian Ewing, asserting the country has been in a "political ice age" since the Reagan presidency.

That caught my attention since I hadn't really noticed the chill. What had the Gipper done to send America into a deep freeze? There was no explanation in the story.

Nor in this article in the Chicago Defender earlier this year.

"We have been living for 40 years in a political, moral and spiritual ice age," West told the congregation at a Chicago church, the Defender reports.

Forty years? That goes back long before Reagan's presidency, which began 27 years ago. Maybe it was Nixon's election in 1968 that sent the nation's temperature into a dosedive.

No, wait, it's a 30-year freeze, West said at Central Washington University last week. But Reagan is at fault:

"The last 30 years we have been living in a political ice age," West said. "It started with Ronald Reagan, who kicked off his 1980 presidential race in Philadelphia, Miss., where three civil rights workers had been murdered in 1964."

But wait. In remarks last year to the 2007 Left Forum, West tracked the ice age back 35 years:

"What is going on? Is the Ice Age beginning to melt? Is it the case that the thirty-five years that Brother Stanley talked about, the Ice Age, the historical period where it's fashionable to be indifferent to other people's suffering -- indifference is the very trait that makes the very angels weep, to be callus toward catastrophe. And it's true, New Orleans was catastrophic before Katrina hit. Flint, New Orleans without Katrina."

Let's see, 35 years back from 2007 was 1972 -- Nixon's re-election?

I'll grant it's hard to tell when ice ages set in. It's not like one day it's a little cool and the next you're frozen solid. These things happen gradually.

It's his definition that's important -- the onset of a time in our history when it's fashionable to be indifferent to other people's suffering. Prime example: Hurricane Katrina.

Which strikes me as pretty odd because I thought Americans opened their wallets with unprecedented generosity, giving to the American Red Cross, Salvation Army, Katrina Relief Fund and many other efforts, that communities across the country opened their doors to evacuees, that mission teams from everywhere still volunteer for weeks at a time to work on behalf of hurricane victims.

Overall, charitable giving in the U.S. just keeps increasing year after year.

I imagine West, as a self-proclaimed liberal, actually counts only what the government does. Individual generosity doesn't figure into whether Americans actually care about other people's sufferings. Only his view of Nixon, Reagan or Bush matters.

That being the case, the only way to emerge from this ice age is to elect a liberal president.

I only wonder who he thinks would be generous enough with taxpayers' dollars to thaw us all out.