Over the past decade our patriotism has gotten muddled more than ever.
As always, the disclaimer: The Founding Fathers didn’t all want a true democracy, and we haven’t yet achieved the democracy many of us do want. Yet, great democracy is what we advertise around the world. The veil is thinning, though. Our actions speak louder than our words and America is on thin ice, politically, socially, and as a nation, at home and around the world. Worse, the obstinance of our ruling class will be the death of our democracy if we don’t reel it in.
We have always had problems and still do. We were, however, for a short and beautiful time, making strides in the right direction. Despite the consistent and powerful faction that impedes progress, our majority pushes together to homogenize and advance. Unity is the only strength that will keep America and her people safe from creating chasms that lead to a fractured nation bathed in an unrest that cultivates vulnerability from outside forces and from the damage we can do to ourselves.
America has been divided on many issues often but, today, we aren’t only divided, we’re confused. Today, we’ve lost sight of not only how to achieve our goals for America, but we’ve absolutely lost sight of what those goals are.
From our beginning, democracy was a smokescreen for what was really being pursued. The birth of our “democracy” didn’t free the slaves or deliver equal rights to women, even as wives or mothers. Our civil war didn’t either. Even when freedom was granted, equality was not. We are still fighting these ancient battles, in crime and justice, schooling, health care and health issues, housing, glass ceilings, and numerous other ways. We were moving, albeit slowly, in the right direction, but the deluge of muddled facts and misplaced patriotism only in the past 10 years have set us back at least five decades.
Our people still believe in the dream, and true Americans still advocate for equality. The problem is selling it to the people at the top who live lavishly in America’s hypocrisy. We are still the nation that roared like a kitten, shouting for democracy and equality for everyone but not really meaning it. None of us is ignorant of these truths. Some are in denial or uninvolved, some are optimistic, some are comfortable with it, some feed the fire that provides the smokescreen, and some simply put personal gain above national safety, sovereignty and America’s global image.
Our current crises are tragic. We lead the world in violence, private gun possession, mass shootings, and corporate power in an assumed democracy. We have private “for profit” prisons – an actual economy built on maintaining a prison population that is shameful on a global scale – and the protection of the freedoms of some to promulgate their beliefs as the only truth. Some do it so completely that those same rights of others become violated.
We are revisiting issues we resolved or were close to resolving like racial issues, corruption, poverty, wealth control, workers’ rights gone the way of the dodo, and the conning of America’s consumers. Now we also face open, unabashed defiance by legislators to legislate unless they get their way. This is, indeed, what a corporately controlled nation being run for private profit looks like. What used to be whispered is now shouted by those who want a new America, one that silences those who are being systematically separated from their rights. We saw that in recent elections and, in some states, the absolutely un-American voting restrictions that followed.
Still, we fight for our country, ignoring the bandwagon now running in reverse. We refuse to lose ground gained by the changes that helped us achieve as a whole. Those changes should have been easier, and weren’t radical enough, soon enough, fast enough, or even just plain “enough.” We cannot afford to slow our advance, or worst of all, start going in reverse.
Our democracy and our diversity have always been our leg up on the rest of the world. Those freedoms and that diversity must be reflected in and advocated for by all of our leadership. Anything less than our best will not only impair us but, if we keep locking doors to keep people out, we will find ourselves locked in … trapped in a very small box from which there is not only no escape but from which we no longer have a view.
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