America's 250th

 

I could not let America's 250th birthday pass without some comment.   I love this country, but frankly this is not the country that I grew up in.   I'm not sure exactly where we went wrong and although it would be very easy to blame the current administration and the whole MAGA movement, that is to easy of a solution and not entirely true.

What ills America today is a combination of things.   A combination of errors, bad decisions, mistakes that created a cascading effort.   We simply are not the country we thought we were and the proverbial chickens have come home roost.  

Nor do I have a solution.   

So why write about America's 250th birthday at all?  

Because I believe in this country, despite where we are currently.  Because I am a student of history and we have seen all this before, and we have seen the solution to it as well.  Because after much thought about the state of the world and reading about how the individual people in the world are changing things, in mass and without some guidance are making the world a better place; and the realization that I am not so much a social democrat as I thought I was.  

Celebration at Lexington

Let's start at the beginning.   America was born out of an idea.  That the citizen could be part of the government, that they could have a voice in the government.   This was a radical idea at a time when Kings ruled countries absolutely.  The concept was foreign, strange and perhaps would not have taken hold anywhere else at the time.  

America was far from Europe, a place where the land could be exploited.  A place that seemed unlimited in possibilities.  That myth would taint not only the European view but the American view of themselves for generations to come.   Unlimited potential and America offered something else too.  The chance to live in peace.   Where as Europe had suffered hundreds of years of religious wars, here was a nation that accepted, and even welcomed religious differences.   Not that there wasn't tensions, but we were building a nation and we need the Jew, the Catholic, the Protestant to put aside their difference and work together.  

For the most part, they did.

We may have had our issues with the Irish and the Chinese and the Latino, but we had a country to build and they were cheap labor.  They were welcome and before you know it, we had adopted "the other" as Americans.   Their customs, food, language become part of a greater whole.  It took time but the Garcia's, the "ski's" and the Wong's became common American last names.

That any child could grow up to be what ever they wanted to be and not defined by their family, wealth, sex or class become an concept that seemed impossible anywhere else in the world was somehow reality in America.  

Standard stock photo

Manifest Destiny became ingrained in the American psyche, and that allowed for a self-affirming, expansionist group think, that somehow our own personal destiny was to expand, dominate or transform the world around us in a way that aligns with a perceived higher purpose.  While it did inspire ambition and progress, it also came at a great cost as individual native cultures where wiped from the map, where inequality, racism and moral complacency became part of our shared national ideology.  

Even though this America has warts, it's the one that I still choose to believe in.  Because it accepts the "other" as one of our own.  Because it's open to change and new ideas even though it takes time for them to take root.  Despite the wringing of hands over Trans people playing sports, the concept that gender is fluid doesn't seem that strange to a majority of Americans.   The homosexual lifestyle is more or less accepted.   Mixed race couples, once illegal, are now seen in every state and accepted as "normal."

In the America that I grew up in, fear was not that big of an issue.   Sure, there were some neighborhoods that one didn't go to unless your were looking for some sort of trouble.  I have walked the streets of many a city both here and overseas and I've never felt afraid.  Well, once, but that is not important to the subject at hand.  

Somehow someone realized that fear could be sold as a commodity.   Marketed and sold.  Thus we have had an explosion of guns, and with that came shootings.  With that came more news about crime and the process repeated.   

Somewhere we stopped talking to each other, our communities faltered as we went online to find communities that repeated the same lies that we told ourselves.  That the other side was wrong about everything, that they were twisting our history and our myths and how dare they ban this book or cancel this person or.....we became the enemy.   

America is NOT a neat little package...it's not a commodity to be sold.   It's loud, messy, confusing and at times mean, racist and afraid of its own shadow.   It's also diverse, accepting in it's own ways, remarkable, tragic, beautiful, and most of all, forgiving.   It learns from it's mistakes but makes them again.  It is more divided than it's ever been.

Yet, I still love it. 

I'm proud to be American, although I'm not proud of who is currently in power.  Nor am I proud of those that enable the current government, in either party.   

America is broken.   Capitalism in it's current form has broken it, and yes that is true.  Our economy has stopped working for the majority of Americans.  

We need things like Medicare for all.  We need serious talks about Universal Basic Income, because like it or not the days of mass unemployment are coming.   We need to seriously discuss the food deserts, climate change and green power.   The basic needs of it's citizens somehow stopped being met.  Again it's hard to point out an exact moment or date, but it happened.

In the Robber Baron era, from roughly 1875 to 1900, we faced many of the same issues.  Corrupt government, obscene wealth obtained by monopolization and exploitative and often unethical business practices.   What happened in the ten years that followed was the creation of the modern America that most people my age remember.   It was the time of the Progressive.   I believe that we will see that time again.  

Democracy only works when the people take part in it, and understand it.   It's not something that has been taken from us, but I do feel that is is something that we can easily lose.  We need to strengthen what made America great to begin with.

I believe that we, the American people, stand at a cross road.   Where we go from here is yet to be determined but we can choose the mess, the noise, the understanding that we, Americans, can come together to solve the issues that our country faces, or that we can continue to pull apart.  

If that happens, if we choose to continue to weaponize our differences, then we might as well Balkanize right now into a few different Republics.   I don't believe that's going to happen, at least not yet.  However that could be a reality in the next 250 years.  

So, are we the people going to let the great democratic experiment fail?