First, I claim the right to say this; I am a combat veteran with a Purple Heart and have EARNED that right, though one need not have those credentials to say the same things.
America is a great but deeply flawed country. First, I’ll confront some of our flaws, and then I will discuss what is good.
America was born a slave-owning society; we had to wait over 70 years and expend over 600,000 lives to change that.
We denied (and in some cases STILL deny) the right to vote for people based on gender, presumed race, and wealth.
Racism is still rampant, as witness such things as police shootings of unarmed black men, the burning of black churches, the attempts to continue flying the Confederate battle flag on state property, the voting registration laws that disproportionately discriminate against African Americans and other minorities, the institutional racism of bank loans and employment, and the utter contempt directed at our President, who despite it all is doing a yeoman’s job of advancing our economy and pressing for equality in the face of opposition.
We still deny women control over their own bodies in our attempt to “outlaw” abortion in all cases, and in the process depriving them of much-needed health care from organizations like Planned Parenthood.
We still don’t require equal pay for equal work in the case of women, and the Equal Rights Amendment of the 1980’s is still unratified. Accordingly, women are paid an average of less than $.75 on the dollar for jobs equivalent to men, even while they are more likely to be supporting a family alone.
The ongoing resistance to marriage equality – even in the face of the Supreme Court’s recent ruling – shows just how entrenched is the need to enforce one’s own religious values on others.
The opposition to the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”) as evidenced by over 50 attempts by the House to repeal it and the lock-step condemnation of it by Republican presidential candidates – all without offering ANY serious alternative – shows only that conservatives are willing to deny health care to all if it will offer them political advantage. This opposition, incidentally goes way back to Medicare and Social Security as well, both of which conservatives would like to destroy through “privatization.”
Income inequality is now as severe as it was in the pre-Teddy Roosevelt era of the robber barons, thanks to tax laws that allow for concentration of wealth at the very top while hurting those further down the income ladder. In many states – like our own Kansas – there is a concerted attempt to eliminate income tax entirely and to put the tax burden on the middle and working classes through sales and property taxes.
Additionally, we still allow the wealthy to hide their money in offshore tax havens and we allow – even encourage – American companies to use cheap foreign labor to produce the goods and services upon which we depend. Add to that the Citizens United decision (the worst decision since 1896’s Plessy v Ferguson or the 1857 Dred Scott decision) which treats corporations as “people” and enhances the ability of the rich to dominate elections. Keep in mind that, during the Eisenhower presidency, the tax liability for the very top incomes reached 90%; the rich remained rich and meanwhile the country prospered.
The attempt by conservatives to deny the reality of human contributions to climate change is not only stupid but terminally dangerous. If we fail to adequately address this ongoing and growing crisis in the next very few years, our future as a free society and even as a species is in jeopardy. While it is true that the U.S. represents a relatively small percentage of the global population, our contribution to global warming is enormous and – on a per capita basis – overwhelms that of any other country, China included.
Connected to the climate change issue is the use of fossil fuels for energy. Not only are fossil fuels limited, but they are the biggest polluter of our atmosphere. Solar and wind energy offer much more sane alternatives, but the opposition by conservatives and big corporations has hindered the development of alternative energy unnecessarily. Concomitant with that, we have the need to move oil from source to refinery and are faced with pipelines (like Keystone) that will inevitably break at some point, or rail/truck delivery that all too often results in catastrophic explosions. And then there is fracturing (“fracking”) where we inject water deep into oil deposits to force the oil out. That water is absorbed and great gaps are left that produce earthquakes (like those recently in Oklahoma and Texas) and potholes (like those in Florida and other states.) This doesn’t even get into the amount of pollution it contributes to our drinking water sources.
And speaking of stupid, what is with this effort to raise belief in Creationism to the level of scientific inquiry? While we are certainly allowed to delude ourselves into thinking the world is only 6000 years old and that dinosaurs walked the earth with early man, we are equally certain to be out of line if we try to get others to treat that myth as a serious and scientific explanation of our origins. The danger in this is not so much in letting people have their own fantasies as it is in creating a generation of young people that have been taught to believe rather than think, to accept rather than investigate.
This brings up the issue of religion. Conservatives today are crying out for “freedom of religion”, by which they actually mean freedom to use their narrow White Anglo-Saxon Protestant stereotype of religion to deny others the full practice of their religion or lack thereof. For example, they hold that marriage should be between one man and one woman, so all marriage should be defined that way. The fact that a same-sex couple has no impact on their lives or on their ability to marry members of the opposite sex is ignored. Imagine the reverse: same-sex marriages are the norm and heterosexual relations are outlawed – would that be fair? This also ignores the fact that the one-man, one-woman idea of marriage is not universal and that even the Bible seems to support polygamy at least in the time of Solomon. One is reminded of the story of a woman who was asked if she supported translating the Bible into other languages; she replied in the negative, saying, “If English was good enough for Christ, it’s good enough for me.” And then there are all those Biblical rules about stoning adulterers, plucking out one’s own eye, selling daughters into slavery, and so forth; if one is to accept the literal truth, one needs to confront those rules. No, a narrow view of religion without a historical perspective is both stupid and dangerous.
And guns. What can we say about guns in America? Even in the wake of tragedies such as Newtown or Charleston, our Congress cannot even pass laws that require the registration and tracking of weapons, never mind the inability to limit the sale and distribution of weapons of mass assault among the civilian population. When Australia had a massacre similar to Newtown a few years back, it passed highly restrictive gun laws that have actually succeeded in reducing gun violence there to a trickle. Meanwhile, our “leaders” keep opening doors for more weapons and more dangerous weapons to the public. We have the worst incidence of gun violence in the developed world. We lose almost as many people to gun violence EACH YEAR as we lost soldiers in Vietnam over a period of 12 or 13 years. Contrast that to Great Britain’s loss of less than 40 people to gun violence last year. And the gun lobby still argues that EVERYONE should be armed, and then we’d be safer. How often does it happen that someone succeeds in defending him/herself against an idiot with a grudge, just because he/she has a gun handy? I personally have not heard of any instances of this. Statistics indicate that homes with guns have something like 5 times the “kill ratio” of homes without guns. There is just no excuse for that level of social stupidity.
The gun lobby also misreads the Second Amendment to its own benefit. That Amendment specifies the right of the militia to have weapons. Today, the militia goes under the name of National Guard. The Constitution does NOT guarantee the right of private ownership, though such ownership of hunting rifles is understandable.
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So what is great about America? Only the fact that the Constitution and subsequent laws limit the predations by those who would return us to a social setting appropriate to the 1850’s. Even conservatives who would undermine the Constitution if they could are hamstrung by that same Constitution.
They are not legally permitted to have slaves or the indentured servitude of migrant workers, and when they try to get away with that, they often are brought up short by our laws.
As much as they enjoy discriminating against racial, ethnic, religious or LGBT minorities, they are hampered in so doing by the Constitution and our laws.
Our Constitution, though flawed in itself, redeems itself by its acceptance of amendments. In short, we are allowed to overcome our flaws (like slavery or lack of female suffrage) through amendments. We are legally able to correct some of our more egregious errors. We are legally able to recognize that we are an imperfect society in need of reform. The key phrase here is “legally.” There is no need for revolution as long as there is the ability to evolve into a “more perfect union.”
We are not a finished product, despite the overblown rhetoric of jingoistic demagogues. If America is exceptional, it is exceptional only through its ability to change and adapt, not through any intrinsic quality of its people.
As people, we are no better than those in China or India or Pakistan or Uruguay or anywhere else. We happen to be fortunate enough to live in a society that embraces diversity and allows for its own self-improvement. We live in a society where innovation is encouraged, and where that innovation often results in a better standard of living.
There are those who can only see yesterday and who cannot envision a changing society. These are the conservatives who would hang on to the vestiges of the past in preference to the promise of tomorrow. It is important that we not let them carry the day. Not just important but, in the case of climate change, essential if our society or even our species is to survive.