Grieving for America
Despite much of what I’ve written, I am an American patriot. I believe in the idea and ideals of America in a simple, direct way, even if there are more examples of our failure to actually live them than there are of our successes. I want the storybook version of America to be true, and I’m angry and critical when that version seem to have gone out of print. So when I read a paragraph like the one below, it brings tears of frustration to my eyes — not because I want to celebrate our war making capabilities (far from it), but because it shows what we can do together. We have the science, the technology, the money, the everything, to make our nation a great place to live.
What we lack is the will to do so. What we lack is a social fabric, a communal spirit. We suffer from a toxic individualism that celebrates a movie in which the main character says, “Greed is good.” That is not an admirable attitude; that is not a noble value; that is the opposite of what’s admirable and noble. And lest you think I’m making too much of a movie, we have a man who plays at being president while actually being the character who says, “greed is good.” Forty percent of Americans think he’s great.
An editorial writer in “The Irish Times” noted that the world no longer fears or respects Americans, it takes pity on us. It would be far better if they didn’t fear us, but considered us a partner, but they can’t, because we won’t let them. It’s not just Mr. Trump (although he is the proximate cause); American society is so dysfunctional and has been damaged by individualism so deeply that I’m not sure we’ll recover.
Here is the paragraph:
“When the Japanese within six weeks of Pearl Harbor took control of 90 percent of the world’s rubber supply, the U.S. dropped the speed limit to 35 mph to protect tires, and then, in three years, invented from scratch a synthetic-rubber industry that allowed Allied armies to roll over the Nazis. At its peak, Henry Ford’s Willow Run Plant produced a B-24 Liberator every two hours, around the clock. Shipyards in Long Beach and Sausalito spat out Liberty ships at a rate of two a day for four years; the record was a ship built in four days, 15 hours and 29 minutes. A single American factory, Chrysler’s Detroit Arsenal, built more tanks than the whole of the Third Reich.”
Wade Davis, ‘The Unraveling of America,’ “Rolling Stone,”
August 6, 2020.
We are simply no longer capable of doing any of this, of even imagining this, as the COVID-19 pandemic’s grisly death toll illustrates. I grieve for America.
