One thing I’ve not seen during this election cycle, or maybe I’ve just missed it, is the answer to the basic question that Trump’s election phrase, or ‘call to arms’, raises. If it’s time to “Make America Great Again”? When did America stop being great? When Obama was elected? When Bush the Younger was elected? Or maybe it was when Clinton the Husband was elected? Do we go as far back as Bush the Elder? Reagan? Or even Carter?
The earliest presidential election I remember is the Carter/Ford contest. From then on, I’ve never thought America wasn’t “great”. It was and is great. What has changed over those forty years has been a rise in technology and our awareness of the rest of the world. No longer does the nightly news give us a snapshot of what’s happening to us and the world in a brief thirty minutes or hour. No longer is our information limited to a few columns in a newspaper, leaving us wrapped in a nice warm cocoon of world ignorance. Now we can sit and stare at news and opinions 24/7. Be bombarded by what’s happening (and nearly always the worst of what’s happening) next door, in the next town, the next state, or the next continent. And the news is near instantaneous from the moment the event happened. We see and feel the worst that humanity experiences and can inflict on ourselves and/or the world. Information is tossed into our faces and we think we’re informed. People sit on the other side of the camera blathering on about something they have a passing knowledge of, or maybe actually have a PHD in, and we think we are now the next Einstein or Curie (as in Marie. Go read a history book). Or we realized just how little we and everyone in this country knows. We wonder where this country went wrong. Memories of our parents and grandparents accomplishments play through our head and we think, “my generation hasn’t done squat”.
You and your generation are not losers. Each generation, I suspect, thinks this. America is STILL great.
Do we have a Congress that has spent the last eight years largely sitting on their hands with a stick up their collective butts? Yes, but that’s because ‘We the People’ put them there.
Do we still spend over half our annual budget on the military? Yes, but isn’t this one of the things people consider an aspect of our “Great”ness?
Look, many people point to the generation that fought WWII as “the Greatest Generation”. That war was a pivotal moment in human history for a lot of reasons. Yes, it was a completely modern war fought with very modern and increasingly advanced weaponry, culminating in the atom bomb. The pivotal aspect I’m talking about is the philosophical part. Good versus evil. Love overcoming hate.
Each generation seems to fight the same fight as their parents and grandparents. Each generation has to come to terms with the inherent hate we’ve been taught from a very young age and may not even realize is present inside us. WWII was our grandparents or great-grandparents fight against hate masked as nationalism run rampant. Hitler used the Great Depression and post WWI economic woes to turn an entire nation against anyone not a white Germanic person. And despite America’s own racial issues, we joined with the rest of the world to put an end to such rampant nationalistic racism. It was a fight that nearly wiped out an entire generation around the world. Millions died in that war. In some ways, all of humanity has been recovering from a species induced case of PTSD (undiagnosed, of course). Yet, the survivors would say “That was when America was great.”
The Civil Rights Movement became the next generations’ epic fight. Many still battle away in that war. A war which may never truly end, unfortunately. However, likely having heard their parent’s tales of horror from WWII, that generation chose a more political and philosophical route. Protests. Sit-ins. And what’s happened is a slow change in how America and its people see themselves. For some, though, it might be seen as a ‘loss of prestige’. Or maybe power. I’m from after that era, so my understanding of what that generation might feel they lost is hazy. However, they would say “That was when America was great.”
Now, the Equal Rights Movement seems to be the current generation’s fight. The technology fueling the world we live in gives a power to the individual which didn’t really exist before. They look at the fights our forefathers struggled through to make the world the way it is now, but see that so many are still not equal and can’t share in the freedoms that so many other have. So they’ve stood up and said “Hold on now. What about me? What about my brother or sister or aunt or uncle or friend? Why can’t they _____?” Yet their parents look at them and say “Shush! Don’t rock the boat.” Then they turn and shake their heads, think of how wonderful the world seemed in their childhood and mutter, “That was when America was great.”
Yet, those parents have made America great. Have made the entire world great. Look at the world we all live in here and now. Yes, there are still problems to be fixed, some threatening humanity’s very existence, but look at the world. Humanity lives in a world more at peace than any previous era. It’s filled with doctors and medicines which are allowing 7 billion plus people to crowd this ever shrinking world. Technology that lets someone in America talk to someone in Tibet one day, and be standing before them the next. It is a world of the future only dreamt of by our grandparents and great-grandparents childhood minds. A world where everyone wants to live equal to their neighbors. A world where people are on the verge of living on another world for the first time. A world where we KNOW other stars have planets orbiting them, not just speculating about it.
To the ancient world, or even the world of this country’s founders, we live as though gods. Gods jaded to the wonder we are surrounded by on a daily basis. A greatness that surrounds us, lifts us up, and fills us with a health that once was only a prayer and a hope.
So stop belittling the fights you parents, grandparents, and every human before you fought. Look to the world and say not “Make America Great Again.” Rather, say “Let’s Treat the World As Our Equal.”
Or, simply, let’s not bully each other.
A Minotaur's Musings 