My ambivalence toward America on its 250th birthday is not an isolated personal feeling.
A lot of people – Americans and others around the world – struggle to define what America is these days, as well as their place in, and in relation to it.
A lot of that ambivalence can be directly attributed to the current administration. The world has been witness for the past 18+ months (actually, ten years off and on) to the attitudes and actions of the nominal leader of this great country. Many have watched with mouths agape.
In some corner of my memories, I remember what the US was to me growing up as a little girl on Canada’s East Coast. America was the metaphorical older cousin, tall and slim, with sandy hair, freckles, a lopsided grin and a frog in the side pocket of his overalls, oozing certainty and self-confidence. If there was a barn that needed building, he was the guy you wanted on your team. If there was going to be a fight, he was the guy you wanted in your corner.
Our main interaction with America was hopping across the border to Bangor, Maine for school shopping at the end of the summer. New York City was many more levels of magnitude in the realm of astonishment – akin to the Parthenon. An unapproachable playground of the gods.
Visiting that metaphorical older cousin was a mere step down emotionally from seeing The Beatles in concert. Everything about the US was exciting and bristled with hope and possibility.
Those qualities of hope and possibility have been a through line in America’s history. They have allowed its citizens to pull themselves back time and time again from near certain disasters; homesteading, world wars, the stock market crash, the Great Depression, Pearl Harbor, Viet Nam, Milli Vanilli. Some might add the current administration to that list.
The United States of America was formed with a pretty clear roadmap laid out in its Constitution. It has traditionally been treated and deferred to as the country’s immutable roadmap with its lofty and sacred aspirations. It held up over time because its precepts were well thought through by the men who wrote it. It has lately come under relentless assault. And that assault has come from those entrusted with upholding its sacred values. The ship of state has flipped upside down.
I learned some things about my sandy haired older cousin in my ten years living in this country (off and on). The almighty dollar is a primary driver for most of its citizens. Even if it isn’t a primary individual value, the culture keeps it front and center. There is plenty of charitable impulses and activity here but far fewer social safety nets provided by government than in other countries, like my native Canada, for example.
Money is visual and palpable. No cultural constraints keep its citizens from going after or building the best, the fanciest, the best as that mantra is fed to its citizens as their cultural due. There is a collective certainty about America’s superiority that is fed to Americans which can be read as self-serving arrogance. And it may be that but it has dragged people out of the most dire of circumstances that might have crushed others. Americans love a great comeback story.
America thrives on heroes and villains. An often capricious elevation of ordinary citizens to extraordinary heights for acts of common human decency. And it reviles and excoriates its underclass whose crimes may have simply been the stumbling of ordinary sinners. That fascination with story may explain a lot. People’s fortunes rise or fall in the American public eye depending on the utility of the narrative being deployed.
The Duggar Family and their nearly twenty children held this country in sway for years on a long-running reality show. Until tendrils of evil began to erupt in the shiny family facade. When their eldest boy was accused and then incarcerated for sexual crimes, the bloom emphatically fell off the rose. It is probably safe to say the Duggar name will never regain the former reputation and respect it once commanded.
Most humans like certainty and it has been my observation Americans like it more than anyone. Rules are rules and it follows logically that if the rules are broken, consequences follow. There is little by way of context to ease the hammer blow of the system’s harsh judgment. The death penalty still thrives in this country. Rehabilitation is a precept and a word you find in the dictionary.
Navigating America on its 250th birthday and beyond appears to be a matter of weighing and accepting inconsistencies. Broad and deep-seated inconsistencies. First a welcome and open arms to immigrants to meet pressing labor needs and now system wide rejection of those who answered the invitation. It means making sense of widespread poverty and homelessness in a country so rich in resources and opportunities. It is reconciling the intransigence of gun laws when – it sometimes seems – children are routinely murdered. It is reconciling disparities in a health care system that bankrupts people when their bodies betray them.
As a Canadian with access to universal health care, I am used to a system where health care is a basic human right. That it has become a capitalist juggernaut in America is perplexing. Bankruptcy caused by illness? A health care system that actively markets its services? Marketing that siphons money away from actual care? Perplexing indeed.
I’m painfully aware my perspective and analysis of the USA today is personal and superficial. I call ‘em as I see ‘em. I believe general satisfaction would mean living amongst a relatively settled and happy population. I don’t see much of that around me lately. Free floating anxiety seems to be the prevalent zeitgeist in America these days.
If the Republic implodes and the forces determined to dismantle Democracy succeed, these observations will be moot anyway. But I choose to remain hopeful about America and its future prospects. We can hope for a generation that rises up to meet the threat that has emerged and start working toward system wide reforms.
Sure that is a Pollyanna perspective. But hey. Relentless optimism in the face of impossibility is pretty much what has sustained America all the way to its 250th birthday today. It is likely ill-advised to abandon that guiding principle now.
May the Fourth be with you!
Expressive Compulsive 