America Searching for Its Soul
America lost its soul. The 2012 Election cycle began with a nasty haze over it. President Barack Obama
It was cemented when Willard Romney entered the race. The country thought it had seen everything when Governor Sarah Palin through herself headlong into the race. But that was nothing like the umpteenth run of Willard "Mitt" Romney.
Perhaps we should have known things had changed when Congress couldn't seem to come to agreement about much of anything for four long years. The party of "No" was determined to become the "no nothing" Congress.
Meanwhile the oligarchs of the country set about the business: destroy America. I wish I believed there was no conspiracy. That would me feel somewhat vindicated in my views. But alas, the country is headed down a path in which the average middle class American will be relegated to permanent low wage serfdom. I wish the developing world wasn't accustomed to a meager throwaway existence, however it is. And our oligarchs are hell bent on reinforcing that relationship. Draining the country of its capital, enslaving America in debt and leaving us for dead.
We were told that the Founding Fathers were good people. They sacrificed for America. They fought for freedom and justice. In reality the British left the states when they saw the uprising and returned to England or fled to Canada. The focus of those that remained, the wealthy farmers and plantation owners, was to amass as much wealth - whether that meant slaves or land or both as they possibly could. The British awarded patents to their aristocracy, America sold its land.
Fast forward to 2013 and our society has lost even the fire in the belly of the people that started us. The reason clearly is because our soul has been ripped from us. Hope springs eternal when the ordinary man feels they have a hope of achieving a measure of what oligarchs have achieved. In other words Americans thought the American dream was possible.
We knew we could achieve because if we went to school, worked hard, saved and invested we could somehow achieve. This fed our egos, it fed our souls. Never mind where the impetus for that wealth and power came from. Never mind the haves and have-nots. We had a chance at a better life. Starting int the 1840's America started to look like a dynamo. The experiment was off and running.
But by the 1980's something went very wrong. Our social and political institutions collapsed. As the Internet grew and became at first more academic, then more consumer-oriented the 1990's brought what Alan Greenspan called an "exuberance". He worried that it was irrational. That's precisely when we could confirm that America had lost its soul. We invested and attempted to grow just as we had from 1920-1928. Every scheme imaginable was dreamed up once again. Americans fell for it "hook, line, and sinker".
With our new found wealth our young people, the Gen-X and later Gen-Y, the Millennials, were all told they weren't just special, they were extraordinary. People from the Baby Boomer and Gen-X cohorts nurtured their children and created helicopter kids. After all we believed that the wealth we had created would just keep going. It would be a never ending upward spiral. Even when the best minds were telling us otherwise.
Just as in the Clinton era even regulation happy Democrats were more than willing to allow laissez-faire to do its job - don't screw up something that works right? But it wasn't really working. At the heart of it we were destroying America's soul. We were chipping away at individual rights, liberties and freedoms through exceedingly insane Supreme Court decisions. Justices who had appeared a bit batty before, the Warren, Burger and Rehnquist courts, somehow appeared to be reasonable in comparison with those that succeeded them.
And then there were derivatives. Brooksley Born warned the government - she sounded the alarm as loudly as her academic, legal and financial voice could manage. But she was shut down by the boys from Wall Street. Really they seemed more like the Boys from Brazil. George W. Bush claims he was concerned about Fannie Mae at least seven years prior to the debacle which took down the housing market. He couldn't have been too concerned. Some of his biggest supporters, his "base" were making money hand over first. More soulless moneymaking at the hands of the small investor whose meager retirement plans and other investments went right down the drain. Meanwhile the mega-millionaires barely sneezed as the blip on the financial radar ruined so many.
How does America gain it's soul back? By changing our values. Notice that returning to former values wasn't the recommendation. Why? Because some of America's values were not so very good. A country cannot have a soul that does not treat its people equitably. Women, people of color as well as those with a sexual orientation that is different from the "norm"have experienced and continue to experience discrimination. Even if the Founders did not intend for equality they would recommend universal rights today. By embracing the values that are inalienable to every U. S. American we insure our future.
