On the State of Our Nation

On the State of Our Nation

August10, 2019

Here are some of the defining characteristics of the life of the United States of America at this time, in no particular order:

·       We are acting like fascists with regard to undocumented immigrants and causing enormous suffering especially by innocent children.

·       We have an immoral, self-absorbed, sociopathic liar as president whose policies are indeed fascist.

·       Money buys our politicians and controls the outcome of our elections.

·       We have, mostly through our tax structure but by regulatory means as well, created an economy that works extremely well for the very wealthy and huge corporations but works very badly for the working poor, the disabled, and the homeless.

·       We are destroying the earth’s environment and doing next to nothing to reverse our destructive environmental policies.

·       We are cozying up to one dictator, Kim Jong-un, and very nearly starting a pointless and unwinnable war with Iran while we continue a useless and unwinnable war in Afghanistan.

·       Our culture glorifies the military, calling all military work “service” and ignoring the true service rendered by teachers, nurses, firefighters, police officers, social workers, and others who truly do serve and do so without adequate pay or recognition.

·       Our consumer-oriented culture and economy tell everyone that their purpose in living is to consume, consume, consume so that other people can get rich.

·       We have abandoned religion en masse, leaving people with nothing on which to ground their lives and their morals. The most vocal Christianity among us is nothing but a betrayal of the one it claims to believe in and to follow.

·       Powerful politicians, bought and paid for by big pharma and other parts of the medical industry, work to deprive millions of Americans of health insurance and thus to deprive them of access to medical care.

·       We support and glorify a culture of guns, Americans owning more guns than there are Americans (and more by far than the people of any other nation or even than the people of all other nations combined), while powerful special interests block even the most minimal legislation that might in some way reduce the gun violence that is ubiquitous among us.

·       We have a history of racism and white supremacy that we used to tell ourselves we had overcome but which we clearly have not overcome with our president empowering and encouraging white supremacist terrorists.

·       Our president is so enamored of Vladimir Putin that his party (especially through Moscow Mitch McConnell) blocks any meaningful effort to protect our political processes from interference by Russia and other foreign nations.

·       We have an unhealthy trade relationship with China that our president makes worse by slapping on tariffs that he has no actual legal authority to impose, thereby raising prices for everyone and producing a reaction by the Chinese that threatens to destroy American agriculture altogether.

·       The only political party with any hope of changing any of this, the Democrats, are fighting with each other as much as they are attacking Trump. We don’t know who their candidate for president will be next year. More importantly, we don’t know if that person will be able to defeat Trump.

·       Our culture is by far the most individualistic one the world has ever seen. We lack community, and vast numbers of us are so convinced that their only concern is themselves and their immediate family that they resist paying taxes even for worthwhile things and elect politicians whose primary objective is to keep taxes low.

·       We maintain only the most minimal social safety net for those in need while right-wing politicians make up claims of welfare fraud and do everything they can not only not to expand social services but to cripple those that already exist.

·       We live with millions of people homeless and do next to nothing to address that crisis.

·       Our entertainment consists largely of computer generated violence in movies, on television, and in video games.

·       The Republican Party, one of our two major political parties, does everything it can to stop people of color from voting because that party knows that blocking those people is the only way it can maintain power.

·       We claim to be the greatest nation on earth and a beacon of freedom and democracy while we permit all of these things to continue.

I suppose there are even more horrors that I could list here, but this list is already depressing enough. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the United States of America is nothing but an empire in decline. All empires decline, and most of them go through a period of social, economic, and political disintegration as they do. We seem to be going through that phase of imperial decline, and almost no one recognizes or admits that we are. Until we wake up to our actual reality nothing will truly change for the better. In conclusion all is can say is: “Heaven help us.”