Do we have a country?

So much for another quick turnaround. For some reason, I thought I had posted since October 10, but my aging brain is at it again. Actually, I had written a new post about 3 weeks ago but decided to forego it. I have been quite busy for the last month, and I will freely admit that I was very much following the just-completed election. If you read my last post, you know that my candidate lost, and while I don’t consider it be a landslide (a la 1964, 1972, or 1984), it was decisive. And if you pay any attention at all, you know that there have been hundreds of articles and podcasts discussing what went right for the winners and what went wrong for the losers. For example, one of my great friends, in his blog Disaffected Musings, linked to an article by Niall Ferguson in The Free Press which listed his winners and losers. My friend and I sparred over the conclusions a bit (I believe in a healthy way). I don’t want to rehash all that has been written, but I did decide to include my own take, which does follow some of what I wrote in my previous post, but I think the conclusions are some that I haven’t seen expressed (at least in the manner that I’m about to present them). So, here it goes. Hope you find it somewhat interesting whether you agree or not.

As the title of the entry implies, at this point, my most significant conclusion from the election just completed is that I don’t think we are a country right now. I don’t mean this literally; we live within a land mass that has borders, and there is still (at this moment) a federal government and military, but I don’t see anything that unites us, no one trying to unite us, and even if that person existed, I don’t think the majority of Americans would have any interest in doing anything for the good of the country as a whole.

As I stated in my previous post, in my opinion, the centerpiece of Donald Trump’s campaign was grievance and scapegoating. In his podcast The Chris Cuomo Project, Chris Cuomo, whose opinions I don’t always agree with, but whom I respect for his thoughtfulness and frankness, said something pretty similar. Trump’s pitch was that the country was failing, and it wasn’t his fault or yours. Immigrants, the Democrats, the Department of Justice, wokeness, election fraud, etc., were to blame. And it worked; enough people either believe this or bought into it, and he is now President-elect. Now certainly this wasn’t the whole story; inflation and immigration were issues that drove people to the Republicans, and no doubt Kamala Harris was ineffective in addressing these, but even these issues were presented in a way that stoked anger and fear. She did make a pitch for unity in the last 2 weeks of the campaign, but that was too late to change the outcome, especially after she had spent most of the last 2 months as the anti-Donald Trump candidate.

Where this leaves us, IMO, is at a place where a majority of Americans (a significant majority, I believe) say either, “I’ve got mine; screw you,” or “I don’t have mine, and it’s someone else’s fault.” Right now, the US is a land with a severe lack of personal and group responsibility and accountability and very little, if any, collective spirit or action. I get that distrust of government contributes to this, but we put we voted these folks into office, and incumbents are elected at a very high rate. Thus, are we not responsible for putting and keeping these people in power?

If you want a recent example of this attitude, let’s consider the COVID pandemic. Tens of millions of Americans refused to be vaccinated despite the fact that it’s safe and free of charge, and similar numbers of people refused to wear a mask. These actions caused the unnecessary deaths of hundreds of thousands of people by increasing the spread of the disease to not only themselves but anyone around them. What the heck, some seniors died, but they were old and lived their lives. And I’m still alive. While I suppose these individuals were within their rights, it’s an example of what I think is a pretty selfish attitude and a disregard for the lives of their fellow countrymen and women.

Public education is under attack today. Now I’m not here to tell you there aren’t issues with it, for sure there are. But people are at each other’s throats nowadays. Given the abuse they receive and the low pay, I am kind of amazed that anyone would choose to be a teacher. And while those on the Right claim teachers and Liberals are teaching “woke” behavior and trying to convert children to become another sex, they aren’t the ones banning books, threatening school board members with violence, trying to rewrite history, and insisting on having Bibles and the Ten Commandments in the classroom. It goes both ways.

Imagine, if you will, that in 2024 there were no interstate highways, and the government decided to construct them. It would never happen in today’s environment. There would be a huge outcry of NIMBY (that’s “not in my backyard” if you didn’t know), and the initiative would fall apart. It would be the same story if a state or the federal government tried to build a nuclear power plant (which I think should be seriously considered). Again, lawsuits would be flying from day 1.

Also consider that the space program never existed and there was an attempt to start it today. The collective will to do it would be non-existent. Too damn expensive, people would say, and why would we even want to go to a place that was uninhabitable anyway. There would be no discussion of any potential long-term gain from this endeavor, and we know now how much was gained from having a robust space program (think laptops and the internet for starters). I won’t even get into mitigation of and defense against global warming.

I didn’t enjoy writing this post. I want to be wrong. And maybe in the near future I will be proven wrong, and this country will come together and at least coexist peacefully. But given today’s hyper-partisanship and self-centeredness, I’m not optimistic about the re-emergence of the United States of America given the current state of affairs. The last time the country came together was in the aftermath of the 9/11 attack, and I suspect that if we were seriously threatened today, people would stand there and point fingers at each other until it was too late.

I don’t profess to have the answer to the problem I just presented. One small thing I am trying to do is to acknowledge and be polite to others and engage positively when I get the opportunity. Maybe if we start there, we can eventually have constructive dialog and eventually action again.

#United States

#Disaffected Musings

#The Chris Cuomo Project

#The Free Press

#Civil discourse