I would like to see all Americans look at ourselves as 2021 grows near and ask what we can do as individuals and as a whole to end the disfunction. I seriously doubt that will happen but it remains a very nice dream.
I traveled this nation professionally for 23 years. I spent time in every quadrant of the lower forty-eight states. I worked with busines owners of many types and listened. That was partially my job and it was also my wont. I was in an industry for which I have a passion and every conversation gave me a chance to find a new viewpoint.
Those same conversations also taught me about the mood of the country.
I learned from business owners as well as from their minimum wage employees. I talked to manufacturing engineers, airport runway engineers, food servers and ticket takers. I asked CEOs how business was and I asked sign painters how much work they had in a normal week. I saw a food fight in an airport and I talked to men and women who serve in the United States military. I ended up in hospitals three times and talked to nurses, aides and doctors. I started writing my first book during that time and I talked to librarians and archivists.
I once told the governor of Indiana and an under Secretary of something-or-other to shut up because the national anthem was playing.
The anger was something I felt rather than witnessed. I didn’t see much of it, but it was there. It was an accumulative experience. The anger I sensed was from Americans toward Americans. The federal and state governments sometimes got the blame but the real anger was directed from us toward us.
Americans are mad at each other and have been for a long time. You see it in politics and in every other walk of life. The greatest strength of our society is the collective rights and freedoms of the individual. The most difficult weakness our nation has to overcome is that same list of individual rights and freedoms. To be blunt, we have eliminated from our national mind frame the willingness to collaborate. All that’s left is anger.
This happened long before the current administration entered the White House and it will continue long after the next bunch gets to work. While it is very easy to point a finger – any finger – at one individual and cast blame, it would be both inaccurate and pointless to do so. There is plenty of blame to go around. Everyone, it seems, has an agenda.
Sadly, few people include anything in their agenda that includes considering what is best for the greater good.
Our planet is experiencing the most impactful health crises since the end of the First World War and far too few of us humans were willing to take the simple precautions that could have limited the spread of the illness half a year ago. We had the virus limited but we were too dumb or too lazy to stick with it and now the thing is getting more of us sick than at anytime since it came to the US from China. You can’t blame a president, senator, governor or city council member for what has happened this winter. This one is on all of us.
Can we agree to disagree and find compromise solutions to problems? Can we work together enough to make an imperfect world less imperfect? Can we overcome enough small problems so that the bigger problems don’t seem so impossible to solve?
In the mood the nation is in right now, no we can’t. That anger I sensed years ago has split us wide apart and it is still here. One descriptive term you seldom hear anymore is ‘moderate.’ There are no moderates.
What we have instead is a nation of non-listeners. That means no ideas are being exchanged and, in the long run, that means nobody is thinking anymore. You see, you can’t think if you don’t listen. If you don’t think or listen, then you can’t learn.
America used to be about learning, which is the most collaborative activity in the world. We don’t do that anymore, I’m sorry to say.
More is the pity. Once we stopped learning, we got mad. And now we’re sick, too.
“We have met the enemy,” Walt Kelly wrote, “and he is us.”
Happy New Year.
