I know tomorrow is July 4th because some douchebags are already shooting off fireworks somewhere nearby and my kids are having trouble sleeping. So let me diverge from my Novarium updates to offer you some patriotic navel-gazing and political science wankery. Hey, I gotta get some use out of all that time in graduate school, OK?
At least you can rest assured, I am not a partisan. My blame is equal opportunity.
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I love the idea of the United States. I love American History, always have. The Founding Fathers are the closest I think the world has come to Plato's Republic; rule by the enlightened class. I love the idea that everyone deserves freedom and respect, that we are willing to spill our blood and treasure to save the political systems of other folk, and when I listen to Neil Diamond's Coming to America, I almost always tear up a little bit.
Unfortunately, I am smart enough to distinguish between ideas and reality.
I am all to familiar with the epic ways in which my nation fails to live up to it's own standards; at home and abroad. However, I try to temper those thoughts with the many ways things have gotten better over the years; from slavery to Jim Crow to Civil Rights. From Abigail Adam's plea to "remember the ladies" to women's suffrage. From the Trail of Tears to Casino licenses. However, in the past quarter century or so, I feel like we have really lost our way. Some of this is due to changing technology and media delivery, some due to ideological tomfoolery, and some of it due to just downright stupidity on the part of our leaders. There is no one person to blame, nor one political party. Some of it is the complacency brought on by not having a big bad USSR to worry about any more. Like a married person, we have gone soft now that we are out of the game.
We are all in this together. It is truly our fault. Democracy means you get the government you deserve. So we have no one to blame here but ourselves. We did this to us.
I believe the United States faces near-term challenges that outstrip it's ability to handle.
We have run out the national debt to such a degree that we are now in danger of downgraded credit ratings in the near future if nothing is done. We face growing domestic unemployment that will not go away for a long time because we have adopted trade policies for the past several decades that have encouraged most of our industrial production to move overseas, and we have relinquished our ability to even tax corporations due the insanity of loopholes in our tax code. We simply do not have the strong economic base that we had in the 1970s because don't really make anything here anymore, so bouncing back and hiring more people is just not in the cards. Unless we are all going to work and eat at McDonalds.
We have committed large military forces overseas and we pay through the nose to support them. In return for this, we gain virtually nothing of strategic value. Not only can we not afford our pointless military adventures, but we have welfare systems that are consuming enormous portions of our budget. Our leaders are trying to balance the books on the tiny fraction that remains, because our political system is paralyzed by partisan hackery and corrupted by powerful economic interests that have incentives to stay the course. And I haven't even mentioned the massive environmental problems that are going to be cascading down in the next several decades on top of these political and economic problems to create cluster-fuck of epic proportions.
In many ways, we are the Titanic and headed straight for the iceberg. But instead of trying to turn or stop, we are putting more coal in the furnace. Perhaps we think we can crush the iceberg if we hit it hard enough.
There is a national disaster looming in the distance. People seem to actually know this instinctively. Maybe they can't put their finger on it precisely, but they know it. This is why they form tea parties, hold protest rallies, and vote against incumbents just to say fuck you, even if they don't even understand the issues on the table. People know things are bad. And getting worse.
But the worst thing is that even when people know things are bad, they invest no time in understanding the actual problems, in serious deliberation of the causes and remedies, even in the actual condition of the laws of the country. They don't know precisely what the problem is because they have no idea how the government works, how the law works, how the economic system works, or even their own history on easily researched subjects. and the media feeds their ignorance with a heaping helping of fear and stupidity. As a result, they are easily misled and foolish. They want change, but have no idea how to achieve it. They are the faithful followers of charlatans and crackpots, not the deliberative voters that the founder's envisioned. This is true on both sides of the aisle.
I wish I could say that I see it getting better someday, in the distance. But I don't. Because of the aforementioned corruption and paralysis, our government is basically unable to solve even basic problems; much less complex multi-layered ones requiring nuance and innovative solutions.
And history is a harsh mistress. These kinds of problems are empire-killers. The Spanish and French empires both fell beneath the waves due to epic financial mismanagement, the British tried to avoid that fate by cutting expenses and this just led to the development of a rival that they were too scared to face until it was too late, resulting in the two most disasterous wars in human history. The USSR tried to solve this problem by creating it's own economic system, which then failed and collapsed inward on itself.
We are treading a time-worn path. It just pains me to see it unfold right before my eyes.
In the immortal words of Robert Byrd, today I weep for my country.
Off we march, blindly into oblivion.
