Growing up, as we were taught about the nation's history and our role in its future promise, I bought the vision hook, line and sinker. Taken together, these teachings underscored a few key principles: all people are created equal; freedom is valued above all; no one is above the law; a transparent government elected by "one man, one vote" is directly responsible to the needs of the people.
That I basked in this Rockwell-inspired image of American utopianism for so long is mostly a testament to the fact that as a member of a certain sector of the population, it wasn't an image; what I'd been taught about our country--its values and promise--was mirrored exactly by experience. In my world, everyone was prosperous and college-educated: a free nation of equals.
It's humbling to admit that I carried this privileged worldview into late adulthood, until we launched our internet-based small business and its rocky start brought me to my knees. I'd been a successful executive up to that point, had reporting staff and administrative help and people to call when the computer went "ping" and all of a sudden found myself on the business end of a mop. My 15 years of strategy meetings, airline club lounges and luxury hotels didn't seem to impress the FedEx and UPS guys, who patiently explained how to load the tape dispenser and the difference between a tracking number, a bill of lading and a purchase order. It began to dawn on me that the high-level babble in which I'd been marinating mostly just fucked things up as it pertains to the rubber meeting the road.
Then we opened our first retail store and because our financial situation didn't allow for extra help (we'd invested everything we had in the business), I worked there every day for the first year. In a series of short but emotionally-charged conversations with a diverse cross-section of customers, I found out how truly ignorant I was. I knew how to buy a Super Bowl ad, but wasn't acquainted with even one man or woman serving in the armed forces. I knew some nifty tricks to get a seat upgrade but hadn't met anyone directly affected by our penal system, in which more than 2 million people are locked up on any given day. I could give you restaurant recommendations in a host of cities, but I'd never stopped to consider what the daily life of a non-documented worker is like--how you can't travel by air, have a bank account, rest easily when the police are anywhere nearby or maybe see your relatives again before they die.
I'm not saying the pampered business-class world is stocked with snotty heartless bastards, while the street-level universe of ordinary folk is comprised of saints-in-waiting. It's not about the people at all; it's about the perspective. As it pertains to worldview, my kaleidoscope got whacked. All the bits of colored glass that, for decades, had formed such beautiful, naive images rearranged themselves, seemingly overnight. And the new patterns, in petrifying, vertiginous 3-D when the old flat ones were so pretty and safe; well, they're making me sick.
Take that level playing field, that meritocracy, that nation of equals thing. For starters, maybe it's a silly thing to enshrine, because of course we're not equal. We're all unique, with different gifts and liabilities and not all of us can end up on the top of the heap, as though there's one heap to top anyway. (Of course, here in America, we always mean the money heap. Having been acquainted with some rich people, I've yet to notice a correlation between big money and big fulfillment. But unfortunately, not having any does correlate with big issues like hunger and general soul-destroying desperation.)
But, and this probably isn't news to 95% of the population, the money game's rigged. If you're well-off, you have access to superior educational resources that, in turn, provide entrée to superior professional opportunities. Implicit in this scheme, but something that isn't often discussed, is that as you mature, you're also being socialized. It's totally transparent--you're simply hanging out with friends and their parents--but you're learning key lessons regarding how to act.
When I interviewed for my first advertising job in a management-training program, I became chummy with the Human Resources VP. I asked him why I received an offer when I wasn't able to finish the math test, and he said I possessed all the other prerequisites they wanted in a candidate: I was likeable and gregarious, had a strong GPA from a big-name school, could hold my own at a client cocktail party and, like every other trainee, had traveled abroad for the summer after senior year. Sounds like fraternity rush to me!
And if you're from a poor rural or inner-city background, where summer trips abroad and country club etiquette hasn't been part of your experience? Your public education is generally for shit, because our national priority has always been to "defend" our country against bearded, confused old men who may be torturing their own people but generally aren't planning on doing anything to us. (Iraq is now playing, Iran is a coming attraction, Libya, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Vietnam are classic hits...) So far, the pricetag for just the Iraqi folly, based on Congressional appropriations, is $273 billion or what it would cost for more than 36 million children to attend a year of Head Start. "No Child Left Behind" adds insult to injury by drilling children to the test rather than developing analytical thinking skills, making for lots of great order takers, cogs in the wheels of commerce, but not many managers or future CEO's.
Anyway, you probably don't need college or a professional path because the military is waiting with open arms. I don't think it's coincidental that I didn't know anyone in the service. In the enlisted ranks, it's a parallel universe comprised of men and women from small towns without many other options. Another stroke of genius from the government, because if more middle- and upper-middle class kids were dying or limbless, we'd have mothers rioting in the streets--or throttling their congressmen, who they actually know and to whom they have access, unlike their less well-connected counterparts. This aversion to actually spreading the sacrifice among all sectors of society is also why there is no draft, even though the military is experiencing immense difficulty in both recruitment and retention.
Funny thing, those congressmen, senators, the President, all of whom have draft-age children busily not serving in this epic struggle for our liberty. It reminds me of a bizarre dream I had recently. Strangely enough, I was an aide working at the Pentagon, in a wheelchair because I was missing an arm and leg. I went to a staff meeting with these big deal Generals and we all started laughing because each of us was in a wheelchair, limbless, and couldn't fit in the room. When I woke, it dawned on me that the only fuckers who should be able to call the shots in a war are the guys with wounds--big fat hairy ones. A swaggering chicken hawk like Donald Rumsfeld knows as much about real sacrifice as a big homo like me can tell you about the female orgasm.
So who is winning in all of this? Where are the precious ideals with which our forefathers began this grand experiment? The sick feeling I have is that real Americans--you, me, the people who ring up our groceries, teach our children--are sliding down a slick precipice towards a police state while the same vile spawn who feed off every pathetic human predicament--the arms merchants, ego-crazed politicians of every stripe, soulless multi-national conglomerates--coalesce, grow ever more powerful. Fifty years ago, President Eisenhower, hardly a wingnut, warned about the growing pernicious influence of this same group--what he called, "The Military-Industrial Complex." We nod and shake our heads, think, "Oh yes, goodness me, he certainly had a point." But in the ensuing fifty years, this silent enemy has morphed so cunningly, metastasized into every corner of our lives, we do not realize it threatens our very survival as a free people.
When the government--our government (wasn't it by the people, for the people, of the people?)--sees fit either to disregard the laws or make up new ones as it goes along to spy on its own citizens, all in the name of vague notions of "national security; when it imprisons them for non-violent protests against unspeakable butchery and torture; when it foments a justice system that allows billion-dollar thieves to roam freely while a vast underclass rots in an ever-growing penal system; when it plunders the public treasury in handouts to crony-corporations and munitions-makers while the poor are left to fend for themselves in a disaster; when it refuses to count the civilian dead in an indefensible war, a body count conservatively estimated to be ten times our own, then I am reminded of my father's Jewish family, of its slaughter by the Nazis, an atrocity completely within the scope of existing German law, and how after that war was over, the German people were so anguished, cried over and over again, "But we didn't know, oh God we didn't know."