Who Are We?

So the time has come for all Americans to ask, “Who are we, and what kind of country do we want to be?”

 Over the past year and specifically over the past 5 months, we have seen what it means to be a ‘Trump-lead Nation’.  Actions have been taken and things have be said that profile America and Americans as people who now do not really have the humanistic and altruistic motivations and objectives that have been the driving force for liberty, fairness, empathy and compassion that have been hallmarks of what we always assumed was the definition of our country since its founding.

Currently we have an administration and apparently a large segment of our population that is more concerned with retreating from global leadership, abandoning those of our citizens that are the most vulnerable, venerating the concept that being ‘other’ is a bad thing, encouraging hateful speech, treating others with disparagement, and venerating selfishness and greed over all.  Lying is now OK.  Facts are not important anymore. Truth is not an absolute.  Alternate reality is accepted without question.  Questioning is not relevant.

When I look at the makeup of our government, the people who supposedly ‘represent’ us and make decisions and supposedly are charged with finding solutions to our common challenges as a nation, I am saddened.  Consider the new people running our country….(I suppose the good news is that they are relatively limited in number so far..the myriad appointments of leaders demanded by a change of leadership have thus far been woefully insufficient.)  And yet even with this dearth of ‘leadership’ we still have pivoted to a course where our reputation and perception in the world is spiraling down.  The immutable perception that America stands for justice, liberty, freedom, truth, global leadership and most of all intelligent compassion is disintegrating before our very eyes.

There seems to only be irrational praise and obsequiousness to a man who is not terribly intelligent and perhaps one of the crudest personalities ever unleashed on the world.  Those who revere him deny truth, deny fact, and have a purview that is limited by it’s selfishness, greed, and self-aggrandizement. 

Actually making decisions based on fact and the likelihood of successful outcomes is not important—witness the recently ‘hailed’ American Healthcare Act.  Stabbing 23 million people in the back is apparently OK with the majority of our ‘representatives’ in the House.  Can anyone explain to me why positions of the American populace, as a whole, on issues like Gun Control; Global Climate Change; prioritizing clean energy initiatives; funding for scientific research; advances in education; fixing our decaying infrastructure have been shown to be clearly above 50, 60, 70 or 80%, and yet our ‘representatives’ vote over and over to disregard those findings.  Something is rotten in the voting booth!

What about the slew of Executive Orders that among other things, approve the release of more pollutants into the environment; attempt to unconstitutionally ban a religion from entering our borders, approve the ejection of law abiding non-citizen immigrants from our country without regard to breaking up families;  unilaterally withdraw from the Paris Climate Accords;  attempt to cut off support for Planned Parenthood leaving millions of the most vulnerable without pre-natal care, cancer pre-screening, and birth control.

With each action, with each lie, with each misdirection, obfuscation and distraction, we are becoming less and less of what I thought being an American in the world was all about.  I am suddenly ashamed to be considered part of the ‘New America’.

Unless those of us who share that shame can get our act together, our American-ness will surely evolve into being a pariah-state in our relationship with the rest of the world.  Our youth will grow up believing distorted truths and inculcating distorted values, and then there will be only history to record what we used to be.