Us, Recognizing Rock-bottom
The first step to getting better.
I have been meaning to reach out to people, in an effort to address the problems we face as Americans, for several years. Uncertainty of outcome, imposter syndrome, and the paralysis of perpetual preparation and procrastination have kept me from following through with the impulse to start a broad discussion platform. I wake up every morning with my thoughts already running with how to best start a broad discussion on recognizing our problems and missteps and looking for inroads with my fellow Americans, to begin patching the rift that prevents us from progressing as a nation of people who all want things to be better. I’ve been obsessed with trying to make the best first impression for my “grand endeavor” and thinking of the best way to have easy discussions about difficult topics. I know history has never been kind to boat-rockers, and yet I’m bound to try to rock the biggest of boats. Hopefully with the help of a few million people, we can rock the boat back upright and make it seaworthy again.
My short thirty-nine years has seen some very interesting times for the United States of America, as in the quote, “May you live in interesting times.” (Often ascribed as an “ancient Chinese curse”. A quick search to verify turns up that the source is 20th century English.) Tangents aside, being born in 1983 and turning 18 in early 2001, I am a true Millennial. I am a living Facebook meme, having played outside until the streetlights came on and getting both my first cell phone and MySpace account when I was 22. Like me, the stereotypes of people my age stem from the Ronald Reagan era, where it became useful to be broadly dismissive of opinions and experiences of people that disagree with the version of America as advertised. Anybody older or younger than I can trace that notion through to the present. We see how the way situations are discussed by the television media, politicians, and internet personas seem to negate the world outside our windows. They talk about things that we experience above our heads in a manner that is pointedly designed to evoke a specific emotional reaction. Considering the words of anthropologists and social philosophers seems to highlight the tactics used by people in the established power structures to take advantage of the habits of the human mind for social cohesion, specifically our tendency to complacency and molding ourselves around conveniences, it leaves us to make our expectations of ourselves fit those projected by the companies on TV and Twitter. Despite popular myth, a frog will jump out of water before it cooks to death, but people will justify staying in ever hotter social climates, as we’ve seen plenty of times the pot has boiled over in history. The people in important positions now have use of the broad reach of the Internet and are using the Franklin expectation experiment against us to keep us thinking that they are important, that they don’t need to listen to us that the water in the pot is simmering.
None of this is meant to be demeaning or insulting to you. It is merely the process of recognizing the problems that exist so that we can work together to make things better. In this case communication is both the cause and solution to the problems that we face as a nation of people. Observable factors like generational differences of experiences leads to division between people of different ages, even when we can see the repetition of social situations offset by a decade or two. This adds to the sense of spite and atomization that has been brewing within our population over the last twenty years. Greater expectations from our work environments and ever-worsening ground-level economic situations have led to a loss of intimate social cohesion, coupled with broad political cattle-chuting has left our populace more divided than ever. Given that the Internet has opened avenues to finding like-minded people, our innate sense of seeking a tribe to belong to has led to nebulous collections of people across the country, connected but miles apart. In hypothetically better times this could be a wholly positive thing. Unfortunately, the mounting sense of social insecurity has led to a fierce sense of isolation from anybody outside of the group, and the lack of direct personal connection keeps people from moderating the cynical motives of the more frustrated members. This is just another factor in how we no longer have a United States mentality, but instead a collection of villages of strangers at war with each other.
It isn’t all bad news I promise, but one more point before we start with the salve.
The most egregious problems with the way things have progressed, is that this method of division has a compounding effect. The projection that the people in government have neglected us has deepened the rift between people who vote for representatives of either party. It has made it easier than ever to fight between ourselves, or rally against “the government” than to address the fundamental problems that actually affect our lives. We, the people, need to recognize the people in all the important places in our government are the problem, instead of the structure that they have mismanaged. We call them parties, but the reality is that the Republicans and Democrats are both independent organizations, and outdated traditions from the time when we couldn’t effectively communicate across our States. Since money has infected the democratic process, well before I was born, it serves their purposes of maintaining power to work in dividing our nation into opposing teams. But, to me, the idea of vague checklists for belonging to one binary side or the other seems like a television advertisement that doesn’t jive with reality. As real people living in America, you and I have an infinite spectrum of lived experiences across a massive country, and to boil that down into side A or side B is ignorant in every sense of the word. But because of that ingrained social cohesion we are inclined to go along with the way it’s talked about on television, as if that’s the way it just is.
Rock Bottom is the Good News.
Obviously, we are at the end point of that fiction. There is no productive future to the current method of politics that the tv companies and sponsored politicians subscribe to. They talk about Americans becoming enemies with their fellow Americans over simple disagreement, implying that baseless moral judgments to justify removing rights for people is in any way making our nation “more-perfect”. The better-by-comparison downward spiral of the lame party binary has reached a point where they scream expectations that each election is based on voting against candidates, instead of voting FOR actual productive representation. The time has come to recognize that we are both running out of that particular road, and that it’s time to make things better for All of US.
The hardest part of making the first steps to inspire my fellow Americans to make things better isn’t the cynicism and lack of faith in systems that I have listed as factors in bringing our nation to this low point. It’s the reluctance I have in suggesting that the solutions to many of our problems lies in very simple ideas. I know that the biggest ideas move best when presented as simply as possible. Not implying that people are simple, but that our minds are so preoccupied with the tangible factors in our individual lives that an on-ramp to good ideas needs to meet you where you’re at for you to consider it.
A Discussion for All of US
Since I started making notes and outlines for this, on a laptop I found in the trash while working, I knew the cornerstones for the structure I wanted to build. The first is productive, effective, adult conversation. Productively, absolutely positive in motive, facing only towards making things better. Not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good when we talk about systemic solutions but recognizing that gradients in application need to be considered, instead of the dumb all-or-nothing approach of governments that place themselves above the people they serve. Effectiveness comes from the input of the participants in every circumstance, no statement or conversation is the end-all for good ideas to grow. Any notion I share with you, or that we discuss can be amended to allow for new information. And finally, “adult”, because recognizing the negative precursors to our current situation is necessary to doing better, and because often being an adult in situations means doing things that you don’t necessarily want to do but must do to improve the situation. Doing the hard work, and not giving in to emotions to negate the necessary discussions, recognizing causes and effects in whole. To this adult contingency, there is the balance of childish behaviors: curiosity, imagination, playfulness; these lead to the consideration for others that keeps the village intact, the artful creation that gives a nation spirit, and finds ways to better enact changes and serve the needs of people than to repress and build stolid bureaucratic structures.
There is no end to the inspiration I find in people and art to pursue this project. Given that one facet of my approach is to relate the most romantic notions behind the founding ideas of the United States of America, I’m often inclined to call this a new American Revolution. I don’t know if that’s too ostentatious, but I do know that we need to turn things around, and I know that the original Revolution was about the ideas for a national experiment designed to make thing better for everyone living here. Even if they’ve never been executed with the best intentions or the best outcomes, our current ability to communicate effortlessly across our massive nation gives me hope that we can foster a golden age of democracy. “Of, For, and By The People” has never seemed more in our reach, if we’re willing to work for a USA that really is for All of US.