The Hard Reality

After the trauma of January 6th, I went silent for a few months.  I needed some time to process what had happened and what was happening to my reality, our reality as Americans.

 

During my life I have always taken for granted the liberties we enjoy as Americans and the lifestyle we live.  Because it has been relatively easy to glide through life as a baby boomer who is white and 'privileged',  I really never once doubted that being free was something I couldn't count on.  I remember in grammar school we had these larger-than-life Norman Rockwell posters of the Four Freedoms hanging in the main hallway.  I would look at them every day and they were comforting to me in the way that Norman Rockwell portrayed the American ideal, the American birthright.  I am sure you all remember them:  https://www.nrm.org/2012/10/collections-four-freedoms

 

Those posters came to epitomize for me the values that my parents and my school wanted to embed in

me.  There was a purity in those faces.  There was a purity in the messages.  There was a fundamental truth in all of those scenes that was filled with the essence of Americanism:  a belief in truth; an assumption that people were good; the belief that we all have respect for one another; and the bedrock principle that faith and family would always be there for support.

 

Because I was young and naive, I never considered that war was something that has no rational foundation, or that there were not black or brown faces in Rockwell's paintings.  Those Rockwell images only spoke of hope and idealism, not the naked truth of any of the grotesque backstory that was somehow not present during my early education.  Only later as I grew would I become aware of the reality of what life as a human on earth was really about.  But as that awareness grew, I became increasingly appreciative of what being an American was and how lucky I was to be born and raised in this peaceful place while the rest of the world was rife with unrest, ugliness and death. 

 

And so I lived my life.  I had successes and love and peace in my life without considering that  none of that would have been possible without that bedrock belief in my country and its values.  As I became more politically aware, I was disturbed by McCarthyism; Watergate, the War in Vietnam, and all the other cognitive dissonances that intruded on the protective barrier my mind had constructed using those tenets of 'Americanism' embodied in Rockwell's paintings.  I simply was not aware of the vast mass of American citizens who somehow felt more and more separate and excluded from the American Dream.  

 

In “The Bitter Heartland,” an essay in American Purpose, William Galston, a veteran of the Clinton White House and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution think tank, captures the forces at work in the lives of many of these people:  "(We) have witnessed the growth of a potent new locus of right-wing resentment at the intersection of race, culture, class, and geography — difficult for those outside its orbit to understand. They have a sense of displacement in a country they once dominated. Immigrants, minorities, non-Christians, even atheists have taken center stage, forcing them to the margins of American life.”  

 

Was Galston describing the people in Rockwell's paintings?  I don't think so.

 

My perception of those that Galston describes --those who follow Trump--based on what I see on the news, in interviews with them, in their writings, in the halls of Congress and our State Legislatures is a segment of our citizenry that is foreign to me.  Theirs is an alien moral system that does not value truth.  Lies and misinformation are to be believed; evidence is of no value.  Critical thinking and awareness of science and facts don't have relevance.  In the face of overwhelming factual reality, belief in a lie takes precedence.  Regard and respect for their fellow countrymen is absent if one does not agree with them, rather they are considered to be the enemy.  Belief in representative government with the right of each individual to vote is replaced with finding a way to deny those with differing views a voice.  Naked power is the only motivation.  Democracy as we have known it for 250 years seems to be warped in their view.  Winning elections by any means is the only motivation.

 

We have seen what happens when those whose guiding star is what I have just described come into conflict with those whose moral compass is congruent with my own....the riots of January 6th.  The shock

of that realization is hard to accept.

 

The aftermath of that insurrection has laid bare the deep gash suffered by our democracy, and the most unsettling part of that realization is that we are truly in danger of seeing our way of life permanently changed.  The forces of this new fascist mindset are strong and still working to gain the upper hand.  The America that was my bedrock is in great peril, and unless we forcefully figure out how to fix this wound, we will be forever changed and the guiding principles of truth, justice and the American way will be lost forever.