Tag: united states

We’re Not Going Back

“There is nothing which I dread so much as a division of the republic into two great parties, each arranged under its leader, and concerting measures in opposition to each other. This, in my humble apprehension, is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil under our Constitution.” ~ John Adams

Banana seat, baby!
Back in time to me riding my bright, banana seat bike in Buffalo

Well, it’s been a day. At 5 pm last night, I turned the tv on to watch election coverage. By 5:15 I was so anxious I consumed a gummy so I could calm down. Round about time the electoral map started loading up with red states, I took a second gummy, turned off the tv, and went to sleep. I woke up at 4:30 and checked the results. I’ve been awake ever since.

I spent most of the day in a fog. Just numb. I wandered around. My logical brain kicked in, and I began running through things I might want to do before Inauguration Day. Maybe check to make sure I’m up to date on all the vaccines I want to have on board before an anti-vaxxer takes over the Department of Health and Human Services. Delete some social media accounts. Make a plan for maintaining my mental and physical health over the next few years. Cut back on spending because things are going to get more expensive once the tariffs are put in place. You know, just a basic list to convince myself everything is going to be fine. It’s just a new business as usual.

Then I progressed to rationalization. Yes. There is plenty in Project 2025 about which I need to be aware, if not concerned. My husband is a government employee who could lose his job and his pension. I have pre-existing health conditions that might not be covered if we are forced to shop for new insurance and the Affordable Care Act has been tossed out. I take medications that may not be available in a Trump presidency. Other than few those things, though, I’m downright fortunate compared to many. We’re a white family with two sons who are finishing college. We’re financially secure. We have no family members who might be deported. We do have concerns for the gay and lesbian people in our lives, along with the trans humans we love, but we live in a solidly blue state with protections in place, at least until the federal government creates new laws superseding our oh-so-important “state’s rights.” Overall, we are in a safe-ish place with regard to the wishes of the incoming administration. We can use our privilege to fight for those who are less fortunate than us over the next four (forty?) years. It will be okay, right?

Then tonight grief smacked me in the face hard, and the tears came. As I sat on the floor and wept, my pups crawled into my lap, which just made me cry harder for the love. When the tears stopped, always questioning, I tried to pinpoint why I had finally broken down, and this is where I landed. I grew up believing in the promise of America, a patchwork quilt of unique souls who, when combined, made a stronger whole. I loved this vision for us. I knew we had problems. I was not blind to them. Rather, I chose to look away from them and instead naively believed we would overcome them someday. And I kept feeling maybe we were inching closer to that day. Lured by a glorious vision of a biracial woman in power, I kept imagining that promise of America was nearly in our grasp. It wasn’t. I had been captured in a blue bubble, unconvinced of how differently many others were viewing the same country I was living in. Many people here don’t want a woman in power, heaven forbid a brown one. Many people do not feel that is progress. Now I fear that our opportunity to ever reach that promise I was promised has slipped away. It was probably a mirage to begin with, some whitewashed idea of a shining city on a hill that we never really were and likely never could have become with our history anyway.

I’m still processing my grief while 51% of American voters celebrate their win and make self-righteous statements about putting politics aside and being friends now. I’m not there, folks. I’m just not. Half of you didn’t like what the other half of us were happy with for the past four years, and you made no attempt to hide it, whinging about all the “woke” policies. Now the tables are reversed, and we’re not all that excited about what you’ve got planned and I don’t think we’re going to change our minds about it either, just as you didn’t. The only hope for us is to meet in the middle somewhere, someday. Maybe in four years we will know where that middle is. Maybe the left will have become more humble through our losses and perhaps the right will have discovered some of the anti-woke policies you wanted weren’t as golden as you expected. Maybe then we will all be a little more centered and willing to compromise.

If in four years we find ourselves a bit dissatisfied with the future we’ve created and a bit anxious to make some changes, let’s hope we still have the opportunity to hold another free and fair election. I’d hate to think our rallying cry, “We’re not going back,” was actually a prophecy.

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Individuals Feeling Exceptional Have Destroyed American Exceptionalism

Photo by Kyle Mills on Unsplash

I was sitting at the metering light at the on-ramp this morning after I dropped my son at school. I had inched my way to the second position. There were two cars in front of me and one car to my right. As soon as the light changed, the two cars in front of me lurched forward as it was their turn to enter the highway. Then I noticed some movement out of the corner of my eye. The driver in the car that had been next to me decided he’d waited long enough and was merging onto the highway with the other two cars. I see this occur at least twice a day in my travels, and it happens so frequently that I expect it. The metering lights, which are meant to stagger the plethora of cars merging onto the crowded interstate, seem to be optional these days. I shook my head, waited my turn as I always do, and then entered the highway when the light became green.

I’ve tried to eliminate as many fucks as possible from my change purse. I’ve tried to stop caring about jerks who refuse to believe the rules apply to them. I have not been successful. Every time I get into my car, I get triggered by the effrontery of people who decline to abide by the conventions put in place to keep everyone safe and moving in traffic. It irks the shit out of me. There aren’t enough vials of lavender essential oil, cups of chamomile tea, burning aromatherapy candles, or warm neck wraps in the world to relieve me of the tension I feel around Americans who think the rules, whether they be traffic-related or queue-related or common-decency-related, do not apply to them. The “me first” mindset is pervasive and toxic. When there is no perceived negative consequence, people do whatever they damn well please. Their mothers must be so proud.

This morning, as I stewed for the remainder of my thirty minute commute home, I began thinking about American exceptionalism. I understand what the term entails. It refers to the idea that America, with her ideals and her political system and her geography and abundant natural wealth, is a shining city on a hill, an example of the best a nation can be. Here is what I decided about American exceptionalism these days. America has the potential to be exceptional, when we all work together in our democracy and play by the rules. As it stands now, however, we’ve devolved into a country filled with individuals who believe they are exceptional and the exception to the rule. We’ve become so focused on the individual and individual freedoms that we’ve sacrificed the idea of “one nation indivisible” for it. We can’t agree on anything. Believing in the concept of American exceptionalism doesn’t make us exceptional. History is peppered with examples of city-states that believed they were getting it all right. They no longer exist.

Social psychologist Jonathon Haidt hit the nail on the head in an article in The Atlantic on April 11th: “It’s been clear for quite a while now that red America and blue America are becoming like two different countries claiming the same territory, with two different versions of the Constitution, economics, and American history.” It’s this type of righteous mindset that has led us to the place we are now, where every faction and every individual within that faction believes they have cornered the market on what is best and on what they deserve. We’ve become a nation of petulant children, throwing tantrums while doing whatever we want and hiding behind the talking points of freedom and the First Amendment. We’ve forgotten how to adult, how to put on our grown up panties and accept that we can’t always have our way. We tell our bickering children to follow the rules, to play nice, and to compromise, but I’m not confident we’re capable of those things. How can we be a shining example when we can’t even clean up our own house?

I’m not saying that folks who ignore the on-ramp metering are destroying the fabric of our society. I’m afraid it may be a little too late for that.

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Prisoners of Geography

We are all prisoners of geography — literally

I don’t normally offer book reviews or suggestions. I stopped being in book clubs years ago when I tired of other people ruining books I enjoyed. So I don’t feel like a free reading expert, and I don’t share often about literature. But today, given what is happening now in eastern Europe, I want to recommend Prisoners of Geography, written by Tim Marshall. I bought it years ago for our oldest son who is a geography whiz. When he was younger, he would zoom into a location on Google Earth and then ask me to guess where it was. He would then slowly zoom out, bit by bit, pausing after each change until he thought I should be able to get the answer about its location. He had to zoom out a lot. I rarely guessed correctly. He was often exasperated by my lack of knowledge about the globe. It was a game on his end, but it made me feel like a dolt. Ultimately, Joe took the book to college, and I forgot about it.

Then, a couple weeks ago we were with some neighbors when they mentioned they were reading that book together. I got intrigued. So I downloaded the book on Audible and started listening. It wasn’t long into the book that I realized I needed the maps the hard copy provided to help me visualize what was being discussed. So I picked it up and got back to work. It ended up being a timely reading choice because the day after I bought the hard copy and started learning about why we are prisoners of geography, Putin invaded Ukraine. For the first time, I began to understand Russia’s position in the world. I may not understand Putin (who does?), but at least I can somewhat comprehend now why Ukraine’s land is important to him and why he is so eager to reclaim it. Russia, both because of and despite its size, has geography issues.

The book also covers China, the United States, Western Europe, Africa, the Middle East, India and Pakistan, Korea and Japan, Latin America, and the Arctic. The author, a journalist and leader on foreign affairs, has reported from forty countries and covered conflicts in the former Yugoslav republics, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Israel. His vast geographical and political knowledge, combined with his journalism skills, make the book not only highly informative but also accessible and interesting. I now have a better understanding of China’s treatment of the Muslim Uighur population in Xinjiang province. I understand why the concept of manifest destiny was important to the creation of the United States as we know it today. I also have a far better handle on how and why wars have been fought in Europe and why some countries have fared better than others. (I’m looking at you, Poland.) I’ll have to finish the book to learn more about Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America.

If you are looking for a greater understanding of the politics of countries, their prosperity or lack thereof, or the ways they are constrained, I can’t recommend this book enough. It’s a little outdated because it was published in 2015, but it is still useful. If you’re a big-time history or geography geek, this might be too basic for you; but for the rest of the hoi polloi, it is an education in geography, history, and our current political dilemmas in 277 pages. It isn’t going to make you feel any better about the humanitarian nightmare developing as Putin’s army rolls into and bombs the free and innocent people of Ukraine, but it will help you make a little more sense about why Russia is the way it is. Because of the Internet, we are more a global people now than we have ever been before. If you want a way into understanding that world, this is it.

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Flag Fantasy

We took a different route on our dog walk tonight. We usually walk the same way, the same distance, but we were strapped for time and cut off a street earlier than we usually do. On our nightly walks, we see a number of houses with American flags. Some of the houses have two US flags. Some of them have US flags and flag banners. And tonight we saw a house with light strips under the eaves over their garages. The light strips alternated between red, white, and blue.

Red, white, and blue palooza

In the past five years, I have seen more flags (US, Donald Trump, Blue Lives Matter, Don’t Tread On Me, Confederate, etc.) and patriotic displays than I saw in total for the 48 previous years of my life. I can’t drive anywhere without seeing at least one pick up truck, its bed filled with between 2-4 flags in any combination of the choices listed above. My response is the same every time. I shake my head.

Displaying your patriotism is a good thing. I think a home should fly the American flag on each and every federal holiday, the way people used to when I was a kid. On July 4th, it’s completely appropriate to festoon your house with all manner of flag paraphernalia. If you’re hosting a holiday barbecue on the 4th, by all means, put out paper plates and napkins emblazoned with the flag. Wear the flag all over your body. Eat red, white, and blue jello. Whatever floats your boat. On the nation’s birthday, it makes sense to throw an over-the-top birthday party. Every American should also visit a cemetery and place flags on Memorial Day and Veterans Day. We should make an effort to remember and honor those who fought and died safeguarding our freedoms. It’s part of being a good citizen and recognizing with gratitude the privilege of living here.

I just don’t understand why suddenly some people feel the need to go overboard. Is there some sort of competition I missed a memo on? Like if you fly just one American flag at your house, you’re not as American as the guy next door flying two flags? If you have two American flags in the bed of your truck, you’re not as American as the guy with four flags flapping their way, tattered to shreds, down the highway? If your neighbor has a flag up and you put up light strips that cycle through the red, white, and blue all night long, you clearly must be more patriotic, right? This is the only rationale I can discern for this behavior. It appears to be all about one-upmanship and a prideful sense of superiority.

We fly the American flag here at our house on federal holidays and sometimes just because we feel like it. The rest of the time we fly our Colorado flag. This past June we flew our pride flag. I’m certain there are people who feel our displays are not enough (or, in the case of the pride flag, are perhaps too much). But it’s not up to anyone else to judge our level of patriotism. Patriotism isn’t determined by how many flags you fly or where you fly them or how tall your damn flag pole is. Honestly, the constant flag waving by my neighbors doesn’t make me feel less patriotic, nor does it impress me that they are more patriotic. It’s just flag waving. Patriotism isn’t about the flag. It’s about loving your country through the good and the bad. It’s about striving to become a more perfect union, not saying that we are already perfect. Flying multiple flags doesn’t mean you’ve cornered the market on being American. It just means you spent more money on flags. While I’m not a constitutional scholar, I don’t believe there is anything in that amazing document that says you aren’t American if you don’t have an American flag flying in your truck bed.

I know it’s your right to fly as many flags as you want. It is a free country, after all. I just want you to know that I don’t for one second believe you are a better, more worthy, or more honorable or patriotic American than I am. If all your flags make you feel more secure about that, though, knock yourself out.

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