Traveling through the Anchorage airport, I had a chance to visit with Ted Stevens.
Ted is dead now 14 years. Maybe many of the passengers passing by his statue on their way to the baggage claim already have no idea about the bronze man on the park bench, his hand extended.
I sat down there next to our favorite U.S. senator to think about his life as a champion for Alaskans and to read the memorial plaques to his achievement. One with a Stevens quotation reads:
“The ability of the people to triumph in the face of great adversity is exemplified here in Alaska. We are the frontier of America.”
Those are powerful words in tribute to Alaskans, self-described latter-day frontiersmen who pride themselves on great fortitude and courage.
Then I considered Alaska’s current plight, with struggling schools, pot-holed roads, state agencies failing at the minimum of their responsibilities, all the while with $80 billion in the piggy bank, more money per citizen than any other state in the union.
What would Uncle Ted think?
I’m inclined to think Ted would tell Alaskans to buck up, to take stock of themselves, and to live up to the promise of the pioneers. Ted fought for the statehood fight, when wealthy Republicans in the Lower 48 opposed the idea, claiming Alaskans could never afford a state.
Pure bunk, said the proud Alaskans, we’ll show you.
Ironically the naysayers are now looking wise. Alaska is going bankrupt, but not because it must. The state has become both fat and poor in spirit, unwilling to pay the cost of living in the Great Land, unwilling to even try.
Trying would require leadership. It would require a governor who would square with Alaskans and draw up a plan for the state’s future that was fair and realistic. Such a governor would go from town to town, selling his plan, debating with lawmakers and influence-peddlers, pushing ahead through a thicket of criticism and concerns.
That’s politics. It’s messy and it’s work and there are no guarantees of success. More than anything, it requires vision and tenacity, qualities that Ted Stevens had in spades.
Instead, Alaska’s governor seems to be deliberately bankrupting the state and its proudest institutions, including our school and ferry systems. Drunk on some too-long-fermented Republican Kool-Aid, the governor has rejected even the most sensible revenues, including extension of existing taxes to e-cigarettes and e-car rentals.
More bound to his fundamentalist political ideology than to the citizens he was elected to serve, he appears determined to transform Alaska into a northern Kentucky but with bigger mountains and better fishing.
Uncle Ted’s statue at the airport faces the terminal exit. From his bench, he reaches out toward the backs of passengers walking away from him. Maybe we Alaskans, too, are walking away from Ted, walking away from our promise and our pride as a resourceful and generous breed.
Maybe we’ve abandoned the idea that Alaska can stand on even ground with America’s other 49 states.
I’d like to think not. I’d like to think we Alaskans are waking up from a long amnesia, a resigned torpor when we forgot who we are and what we are made of.
And I’d like to think that if Uncle Ted, Alaska’s fiery Hulk, could rise from his bench at the airport terminal, he’d go search out Alaska’s governor and have words for him – or maybe punch him in the nose.