I remember early in the 2000's, I was sitting in Yoav Nir's office at Barco in Kortrijk, Belgium, and he shocked me with the following:
“When do you think the US won’t be the leading country in the world?”
The thought had never crossed my mind, and I was completely
taken aback.
Yoav went on, “I mean, it’s inevitable. Throughout history, every great country,
Greece, Italy, England, has eventually fallen, has gone down in stature. Eventually the same will happen to the
US. When do you think it will happen?”
I just couldn’t fathom this possibly happening. For as long as I’ve known, and for as far as
I could imagine, the US has and will be the greatest nation in the world.
As I sit here today, it’s obvious that has changed, and I sit
here wondering, what was the beginning of the end?
There are a few potential tipping points along the way. I know many would point to the rise of Donald
Trump and the potential Civil War that his Presidency created, but it happened
much before then, and really, we can’t blame him, it’s not his fault, it’s all
of our fault.
I’ve thought a lot about what the beginning of the end was,
and I still have no idea, but I have a few thoughts or really, only opinions,
on when the beginning of the end was for us.
Maybe it was 9/11
It was a huge moment in our history, it was devastating, it
shook the nation, and we suffered massive terrorism on our own soil, and we
came together as a nation afterward.
But, we also showed our really, really ugly underbelly in the process.
We have a long history of hatred and white supremacy, but we
shined brightly after 9/11. We took out
our wrath on anyone who “looked like them”.
By that I mean, anyone who looked in any remote way like a Muslim. If you were from the Middle East, or looked
like you were, you were subject to death threats, terrorism, racial slurs, any
form of hatred that we could impose upon them.
Keep in mind, the KKK has its roots in white supremacy and
Christianity, so this wasn’t anything really new. But it seemed that we were now able to
justify our hatred, and instead of hiding underneath a cape to terrorize and
kill people, we were doing it openly. Clearly
not the beginning, definitely not the end, but in many ways, it seemed 9/11
changed us for the worse.
Maybe it was the growth and
impact of Fox “News”
Fox News began back in the late 1990’s, but has grown into a
phenomenon. Bill O’Reilly began the myth
of the “War on Christmas”, and his cohorts on Fox have been able to keep it
rolling. Now American Christians lose
their minds when people say “Happy Holidays” rather than “Merry
Christmas”. As noted, anyone of
different religious faiths can be subject to slurs, threats and even death in
the US, but American Christians can’t handle the pain and suffering that comes
with hearing those dreaded words, “Happy Holidays”.
The current crop of Fox talking heads like Tucker Carlson,
Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham love to look for any opportunity to make veiled and overt racist comments. While I have found most news sources to be
less than reliable anymore, you would have to put a gun to my head to get me to
watch Fox News. Having said all that about them,
they have found a very popular niche with their brand of hate for anything
different and driving a stake between white Christian America and everyone
else.
Maybe it was when we elected a
black President
I still have no idea how this happened. Maybe we should rewind the clock and say the
election was stolen? OK, bad joke.
I was always a life-long Republican, I voted straight party
until 2016 when the Republican party jumped off the rails. I haven’t gone back, and I may never go back.
While I never voted for President Obama, the funny thing
was, I could never come to dislike him.
I will say I despised Bill Clinton, and Hillary also, or for that matter
most Democrats, but I just couldn’t find a good reason to dislike President Obama. I didn’t always agree with him, but I thought
he was a really good leader.
The interesting thing for me was seeing some of my friends
and colleagues who shared my views on politics lose their minds about him. What was intriguing was the comments were
largely not about policy, it was about how he acted. The most common I heard was, “He’s so
arrogant, I can’t stand him!” I often
wondered, would we feel this way if he were white?
The End
Maybe I exaggerate, but I definitely feel like this is the end. While many will find their own reasons to see
the end as near, here are mine:
Guns > Children
Or more importantly, the money from the gun lobby over
children. The NRA has a stranglehold on
our politicians, many of them should display their sponsors like NASCAR drivers
to show who is funding them. The NRA
spends millions to own our, or I should say, their, politicians.
For those of you who believe we should all be armed to rise
up in the event of some sort of overthrow of the government, you’ve watched too
many movies like “Red Dawn”, where a group of teenagers fought back against a
Russian invasion. It may work in
Hollywood, but not in real life.
Sadly, we are willing to allow our children to be slaughtered just so we can keep our guns, and keep in mind, most sane people don’t want to ban all guns, just assault weapons.
Book Banning
I really find it hard to believe I’m even having to say
this, but book banning? I’ve read some
of the lists of books that are being banned in areas of our country, and many
are some of the most beautiful books I’ve ever read. Toni Morrison, my favorite author, seems to
top the list, but I guess that’s understandable since she’s a black woman. Many others are just flat out stunning, at
first I thought it was a joke, but as I did more research, no, unfortunately,
it wasn’t a joke. We are banning great
works of literature because apparently they are too controversial. To be clear, this is coming from both sides,
liberals and conservatives are advocating book banning.
If you look back in history, this is typically a downfall of
society, a way to control the population by leaving them uneducated or trying
to control what they read. This isn’t
anything new, and it has historically led to the demise of the nation.
Christian Nationalism
This country was founded on religious liberties, and was
clearly founded on the separation of church and state. If we want to change that, if we want to
impose Christianity as the religion of this country, we have fundamentally lost
who we are as a nation.
Taking it a step further, I worship one God, but I honor
those who have a different form of worship and worship a different God, and I
believe our country should not play any part in this. And, worshipping one God, I don’t worship
this country, it is a country I love, but I don’t worship it.
Shipping Migrants
How we treat immigrants (visitors) to our country is appalling. Can we justify shipping these people to distant parts of our country, or even back to their own country where their death is a most likely outcome?
For me, this is the tipping point. I really don’t care what your politics are,
but if you find this acceptable, or really, if you don’t find this appalling, I
believe you have lost all sense of humanity, and really, as a country, we have.
Again, politics aside, these are human beings. Using human beings as a political tool is
beyond condemnation, those who perpetrated this should be tried for their
crimes and put in jail. If our fine
governors in Florida and Texas had shipped a bunch of puppies and kittens to
the Northeast, the cries of foul play would have been deafening, but in this
case, it was just people of brown skin, so largely, we could give a shit.
How close are we to getting the trains ready to ship these people to concentration camps, and then, to the gas chambers? Oh wait, we love our guns so much, I’m sure we could come up with a way to use our guns to eliminate anyone who doesn’t look like us, talk like us, and worship like us.
I’ve sat on this post for a couple months, trying to come up
with a positive spin to this. Sadly, I
can’t, I can’t seem to find the pony in the box, we have stooped to such a
level of hate for anyone of colors other than white, religion other than
ultra-conservative Christianity, and nationalities other than our own, that I
can’t see a way to recover. I’ve been
blessed over the last 25+ years to work for international companies, and I’ve
spent a great deal of my time in countries in Latin America and Europe, and I’ve seen how
loving and caring so many of the people in those countries are.
And maybe, that’s just it.
As I drive through the country roads in Ohio, I see American flags
everywhere. I see and experience white
people who embrace the flag, their religion, their heritage. And I go back to what my dear friend Dave
Carr taught me so many years ago. The opposite
of love isn’t hate. The opposite of love
is fear.
So many of these people are afraid of disappearing into nothingness, into oblivion, just being another person, a minority amongst all of the sea of colors. I’ve been blessed to be able to experience the beauty of the rainbow of colors. Many of these people haven’t been. I’m not defending them, but I am trying to understand them. I’m still not able to put a positive spin on all of this, but at least I’m trying to understand how we have become who we are. Until we embrace who we are, and how far we have sunk, we have no hope of ever coming back to even a good country. Fear has won our hearts.
