Too much of what's killing us, and precious little of what could heal us
One can find villains anywhere one wants to look for them; finding immutable guidance to a path worth treading requires some discernment
How do you answer the question, “What is the root cause of America’s spiritual sickness?”
Maybe I need to back up a little bit here. I’m willing to allow that a question framed that way is loaded with presumptiveness. There may be millions upon millions of citizens of our nation who would respond, “America is not spiritually sick at all. Nearly every indicator of how we’re doing is on the uptick. Most people are happy and well-adjusted, and our institutions and culture reflect that.”
I’m going to go on record as doubting that, though.
I’ll venture to say that, regardless of where one falls on the ideological spectrum, one takes a basic national out-of-whackness to be a given.
So I’m going to take it as a given that that is so.
And now, back to my question.
Is your answer along the lines of “wokeness and final-stage collectivism,” or is it more like “systemic racism and the stifling of marginalized voices”?
Here’s how I see it: if you put a period at the end of either of those answers and are done with the matter, you’re of no help in seriously addressing that sickness.
To be sure, wokeness and final-stage collectivism are gravely malevolent forces.
With each passing day, wokeness takes more hideous forms. We’re way past the point of the harm done by Coca-Cola’s how-to-be-less-white employee training program, or UN ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield’s speech to Al Sharpton’s National Action Network in which she said that white supremacy was woven into America’s founding documents and principles. In the past month, we’ve seen the CIA release a recruiting video inviting those who refuse to “internalize misguided patriarchal ideas of what a woman can or should be” to consider careers with the agency, and the Army release a similarly identity-politics-besotted video series called “The Calling.” We’ve seen Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot say she wouldn’t give interviews to white journalists, and receive kudos for that stance. We’ve seen the Senate confirm Kristen Clarke as Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights.
A grim picture of the lay of the land, to be sure - at least for a sizable swath of the populace. But where is that element to go? The Republican Party? That might be the fight-or-flight initial reaction of many of the alarmed, but it’s a thoroughly flawed response.
Is it really productive to cast one’s lot with a party 53 percent of those who so self-identify are convinced that Donald Trump is actually the president and 61 percent assert that the election was stolen from him, a party that saw only 35 of its House members vote for an independent commission to look into the January 6 Capitol siege? Consider that the Republican president of the Arizona Senate says that the Maricopa County presidential-election-vote audit is a transparent process because - this is not a parody - it’s being broadcast on One America News. Consider that Liz Cheney has been jettisoned from her position as third most powerful member of the federal House while no one is calling for Marjorie Taylor Green’s resignation. That would be the same Marjorie Taylor Green - she of the open marriage in which she carried on with fitness trainers while her husband stood by eunuch-like, and of the documented pestering through the office door mail slot of House colleague Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez - who recently went on a speaking tour with Matt Gaetz, who is likewise in no danger of facing a demand to resign even though he is up to his eyeballs in a sex-trafficking scandal.
This is not a political force equipped to take on the above-depicted onslaught.
To those who see every aspect of contemporary American life permeated by insistence on demographic ramifications and inquire no further as to what might be wrong, I would say that you have no arrows in your quiver worth a damn. You’re in no position to change anything.
And to the overlords of the corporate-academic-journalistic-educational realm, I’d say that you are going to be faced with the question of what to do with the formidably large portion of the citizenry that resisted your program once you’ve vanquished it. Short of lining them up and shooting them, you’re going to have to figure out where to set up a pen to hold them. You’ll even eventually find that you need them. You cannot operate a functional society without them.
While the Left was increasingly defining itself by its power to impose unworkable classifications on the flesh-and-blood human beings of America, and while the Right became increasingly desperate to find a policy-level panacea - in fact, when none was found, an embodiment of a quick remedy in the form of a brawler, regardless of his comprehension of even the rudiments of policy - the route to a healthy alternative continued to exist right under everybody’s noses.
Free markets didn’t go anywhere. Judeo-Christian morality didn’t go anywhere. The possibility of human dignity and a healthy culture didn’t go anywhere.
Getting rid of the bad guys is a Sisyphean undertaking. It’s the least productive way of all of looking at how we might improve our lot.
If we’re truly interested in reversing course rather than careening into a circumstance ever more ridiculous and dismal, we’re going to have to give up our fear of history. In our ten-thousand-years-plus existence as a species, we’ve amassed considerable evidence of what has and hasn’t worked. Taking a look at it can yield results in fairly short order, if we can muster the humility to do so.