Why the Status Quo is Unacceptable
Steven VanDeLaarschot
Undergraduate/World Politics
Ever since I got interested in politics I have always preferred progressive movements and political parties to those who defended the status quo. Among the greatest American presidents, in my opinion, were Abraham Lincoln and both Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt. These men did not just accept America for what it was, they moved America forward, toward the future. They did not believe in simply watching over America, they led America to become greater than what it was.
Theodore Roosevelt epitomized this spirit when he ran for a third term as president. He did not like the direction of his own party and did not agree with the Republican candidate, William Taft. He was afraid that the Republican Party was abandoning progressive policies in favor of conservatism and defending the status quo. So he created his own party, the Progressive Party (also known as the Bull Moose Party), to lead America forward. He did not win the election, as we all know Woodrow Wilson won that year.
All the greatest presidents that we remember were great because they led our country forward in some way. They did not see themselves as simple stewards of a country, they saw themselves as leaders of a nation and felt it was their duty to make life better for their people. Abraham Lincoln led us through the Civil War, kept our country united, and finally got rid of slavery within the United States. Franklin Roosevelt led America from isolation to become one of two global superpowers, taking America into a role of global leadership that we are still in to this day.
To take a different direction for a moment, one of the greatest and best known television shows ever made is Star Trek. I grew up on Star Trek and will gladly admit that I am a Trekkie. It was always incredible to watch the Enterprise flying through space, exploring distant star systems and meeting strange new life forms, but probably the most enduring quality of Star Trek is that it is, while being science fiction, a vision for the future. It has always been a belief of mine that humans can someday make it to the stars and that is why the status quo is unacceptable.
In the Star Trek universe, humanity manages to put aside its differences and come together as one species. Instead of squabbling about who's white and who's black or Christianity against Islam or East against West, humans are able to live peacefully on Earth and even with aliens as well. Humanity moves on to travel to the stars, meet aliens peaceful and hostile, and make amazing discoveries in all sorts of areas.
Humans even go on to form the United Federation of Planets, which Captain Kirk described as “a dream that became a reality and spread through the stars.” The Federation, which was composed of hundreds of planets and dozens of species, is indeed a dream right now, but a dream worth fighting for. The only way to get to that is to move forward, to progress, and that cannot be done if all we do is accept the status quo.
Now I am sure there are some people who would say a Star Trek style future for humanity is impossible, but I've got another quote for that. Captain Picard once stated, “Things are only impossible until they're not.” Science is constantly changing and advancing, altering our understanding of the world around us. Many say traveling faster than the speed of light is impossible, I say different. We may not have the technology but it could become possible in the future, scientific knowledge changes so much that what we think is impossible today may be possible tomorrow.
Star Trek is a dream worth achieving, or at the very least aiming for. For those who defend the status quo I ask; what is it you fight for? Why would people fight progress if it could do away with diseases and poverty and war? Progress very well could do that. Star Trek shows us what we could be in the future if we continue to move forward, if we don't turn away in fear of the new.
Our greatest presidents moved America forward, even if the American public did a little kicking and screaming along the way. They saw that there were problems that needed fixing and that America could be greater in the future than what it was at the time. I very much agree with that belief. No matter how much progress we have already made there will always be so much more progress that we can make. There is more that humanity can aspire to and no one can deny that, at least not truthfully.
Anyone asked to name America's greatest presidents would include Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, some would also include Theodore Roosevelt, George Washington, some would even include Ronald Reagan. One thing that is true of all our greatest leaders in American history is that they were progressives, they looked to the future and sought to lead America into it. They had a vision to lead our country forward and history remembers them for it.
Defending the status quo or even wanting to return to how things were in the past has never made sense to me. America has had a great many problems in the past and has only gotten better as time passed. We as Americans can't look back and say how great it was fifty or a hundred years ago. Our lives are better now than they would have been if we had lived back then. Science and technology improves as time passes, making our lives better in the process, it doesn't make sense to turn away from that.
There are countless movies that have been made that have aliens in them and people love those movies, so don't we want to go out and see if aliens really exist? We can't do that if we just sit back and say things are fine the way they are now. Things might be fine now, but things can get better in the future and if we want the future to be better than the present we can't just sit back and defend the status quo. We need to move forward into the future if we want to be able to eventually “go where no one has gone before”.
Sources:
http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Federation
http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Jean-Luc_Picard