Americans Should be Embarrassed

While we wait to see how America voted, it is abundantly clear that we Americans should be utterly embarrassed. The two men running for President have important differences that have been thoroughly and exhaustively discussed. I want to talk about something more fundamental.

We should be embarrassed that in a country of more than 330 million people, the election for the highest office in the land has come down to two 74+ year old men who struggle to be coherent for reasons ranging from senility, blatant dishonesty, and or narcissism.

We should be embarrassed that these same two men have been caught on camera inappropriately touching women or bragging about inappropriately touching women.

We should be embarrassed that these same two men have both been credibly accused of sexual assault with little to no consequence for their political future.

We should feel embarrassed, in a country that prides itself on thanking veterans for their service, that three of the last four Presidents (Clinton, Bush, and Trump) all actively avoided mandatory service during Vietnam — with no apparent consequence from voters. And that the last four Presidents have presided over a VA that has continued to systematically fail those who VOLUNTARILY chose to serve and sacrifice.

We should be outraged that federally elected politicians, on all sides of the aisle, are not required to put their assets in blind trusts and release their tax returns to ensure public service does not devolve into public profit.

We should feel humiliated that eight years ago a Presidential candidate was derided and laughed at by many in the media for presciently declaring Russia to be a grave geopolitical threat, only for the same media and punditry to endlessly obsess for the past five years over how Russia is a grave geopolitical threat.

We should be ashamed that our infrastructure, once the envy of the world, has fallen into dilapidation and disrepair, and that the regulatory process for repairing it is onerous and costly.

We should be disgusted that housing costs have spun out of control in our restrictively zoned cities causing homelessness to soar.

We should be mortified that our government continues to incur an astronomical annual deficit (before Coronavirus) that our politicians continue to do nothing about, while a increasingly large portion of our tax dollars go towards paying interest on debt already incurred.

We should be horrified that our health insurance system has been allowed to become a greedy, bureaucratic behemoth so large that it seems incapable of regulation or replacement, constantly becoming more intractable despite supposedly lauded reforms.

We should be mortified that our education system, which produced the scientists that built the Manhattan Project, put man on the moon, and built the internet, now ranks 38th in Math and 24th in science compared to our wealthy peer countries — where large percentages of our youth lack basic knowledge about the Holocaust and 23% believe it’s a myth.

We should be embarrassed that we have allowed our college education system to operate like the mafia: always raising prices, extracting taxing loans, and withholding diplomas, while our government has sat by and eagerly participated in pumping up tuition prices through irresponsible loan schemes.

We should be embarrassed that we have allowed ourselves to be lectured on the “evils” of climate change and capitalism by celebrities- giddily cashing seven figure checks from Disney, Amazon, Apple, Comcast, and Co. — who jet-set in designer clothes on private planes between Cabo, Cannes, and Calabasas.

We should be angry that we have allowed seemingly anti-social misanthropes like Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, and Larry Page to have such out sized unregulated control over our personal data to let their companies’ algorithms manipulate what information we are shown and to suggest who we should associate with.

We should be ashamed that a country comprised primarily of the descendants of immigrants now seems incapable of having a reasoned immigration policy beyond the extremes of “build a wall” and “open borders”.

We should be humiliated by our inability to cope with the environmental challenges of climate change while also recognizing that our fossil fuel industry employs millions of honest and hardworking people just trying to make a living.

We should be embarrassed that we cannot both acknowledge the challenges and difficulties of policing, while also acknowledging that it is a job of great public trust that requires great public accountability for instances of wrongdoing.

We should be mortified that we have allowed millions of people to become addicted to heroin and opiates, dying by the tens of thousands every year — annually greater than the total number of soldiers killed in the Vietnam War.

We should be embarrassed that it takes a once in a century pandemic to close our schools and thus temporarily halt school shootings.

We should be terrified that scores of young, mainly black, men are gunned down on the streets of cities like Chicago, Baltimore, and Detroit on a weekly basis; and we have become numb to the violence, despite over 75% of the murders going unsolved in Chicago for black victims.

We should be horrified that identity politics has driven our country into racial and ethnic defensive silos convinced that politics has become a zero-sum gain.

We should be ashamed that these identity politics have brought the forces of secularism and faith — both equally protected by our constitution- into political conflict.

We should be disappointed that people of faith are derided and looked down upon; but, equally embarrassed that the right of two loving, consenting adults to marry one another should be controversial in 2020.

We should be disturbed that our once great journalistic institutions have nearly all become virtue signaling for-profit, corporate media outlets (posting their most profitable years in the Trump era), or endless echo chambers of partisan propaganda that range from: a Fox News’ host, whose millions of viewers believe his every word as fact, but whose lawyers must defend him in Federal Court by saying “a reasonable viewer would not believe what [he] is saying is fact”; to the Associated Press attempting to justify beheadings in France with “colonialism”.

We should be horrified that our capital city is boarding up windows on the eve of an election, as if a hurricane was coming, because of fears violence will ensue regardless of the result.

And we should be utterly embarrassed and saddened that we have now lost two hundred and thirty thousand of our citizens to Coronavirus (nearly double the number of American soldiers who died a century ago fighting in World War I), that our leaders claim we are “Rounding the corner”, and somehow the big outrage is whether or not we should cover our mouth and nose when in public.

Perhaps, the worst part is the seething fear that no matter the result of this election, none of this will change. Four years from now there will just be another stack of embarrassments that continue to pile up. That this once great country will continue to fade. That every four years less will be fixed and more will be broken.

And perhaps, most sad of all is that now, more than ever before, the world is crying out for America to be at its best: economically sound, internationally robust, and morally consistent. Across the Pacific, lies a government ruling over China whose leaders operate with blanket and evil amorality. They seek to disrupt the laws of the high seas; steal the technology of their trading partners; blatantly violate treaties promising democratic rights for their citizens; disregard the legally recognized borders of their neighbors; and imprison millions of their own Muslim citizens in concentration camps utilizing slave labor — to make Nike Sneakers (social justice my ass) — while selling their hair to the highest bidder. Now more than ever the world needs America to be “a shining city on a hill”. But we’re not. It’s hard to see how we ever will be again.

I look back at pictures from the mid-90s, now a quarter century ago. The world was so much less sterile and so much more personal. People’s smiles were imperfect, the lighting was off, and half the time we were not even looking at the camera. But at least we were looking and listening to one another. Our heads were not staring at our crotches, phones in our lap, angrily tweeting and liking and posting and watching stories of some person miles away, ignoring the people inches from our faces. What we would give to go back. But there is no going back. And I’m not sure what’s to blame: the towers coming down, college nerds in hoodies helping us “connect”, sub-prime mortgages, men in black turtlenecks putting computers in our pockets…

Or maybe it’s all of us. Perhaps we have allowed our country to degrade to this point. Each one of us has played a part in the deterioration of our society– this level of utter embarrassment we must all feel. We have allowed ourselves to believe in a series of empty promises from career politicians, charlatan used car salesmen outsiders, or youthful, charming idealist’s incapable of leadership, while tossing aside leaders of principle and virtue. We have shared viral emails and posts reinforcing our views that deep down we know to be highly inaccurate, but we desperately wish to be true. We have allowed social media to consciously manipulate us into seeing and liking only those we agree with — but remember, we pressed the like buttons first. We have allowed ourselves to be consumed by for-profit partisan news outlets catering to our desire to be outraged and angered, instead of catering to a common sense of problem solving. We have been enamored by largely meaningless cultural debates that distract from solving issues that genuinely affect one another. We have turned politics into a game of voting to prevent the other side from winning.

I yearn for the day when I can come to the polls on election day and vote for someone because I truly believe in them, what they stand for, and who they are as a person — not because they are “not as bad as the other guy”. That day may never come again.

But I can take a smidgen of solace in remembering who we are and remembering what we have done: we turned the tide in two World Wars, saving the world from all but certain autocracy; we put man on the moon six times, with computers as primitive as modern high school calculators; we brought down the Berlin Wall and defeated the Soviets, less than two years after OUR President said it must happen; we hunted down and killed the terrorists who murdered our citizens on 9/11; and we have built the overwhelming majority of the internet marvels that have largely kept the world economically afloat during this pandemic.

Remember what we have achieved when united. Ask what part you can play in returning us to those moments of unity and triumph. Look in the mirror and remember Christ’s immortal words from the Sermon on the Mount: “first remove the plank from your own eye, and then you can see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.” If we forget this basic precept, our endless political cycle of outrage, anger, and hate will continue again and again, one revolution after another; questioning whether our fellow citizens are worthy of our time, love, and respect, as we slowly revolve endlessly into the dreaded uncertainty of our embarrassing future.