Dear America: You Can’t Handle the Truth
You might think these truths—and they are absolute facts—are what the title of this essay is referring to. I would never let you—or myself—off so easy.
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by Rich Herschlag
The president not only welcomed but sought out the Russian government’s interference during the 2016 presidential election. The president had a major financial venture in Moscow during the race. The president and his staff coordinated their campaign efforts with various surrogates of Vladimir Putin, which included massive, well timed email dumps from WikiLeaks.
The president fired the director of the FBI to thwart the agency’s Russia investigation. The president instructed the White House counsel to fire the DOJ special counsel, and the White House counsel refused. The president’s National Security Advisor was a paid foreign agent. The president’s campaign chairman was a paid foreign agent who is now serving time. The president’s personal attorney is serving time for making illegal payoffs to obstruct campaign finance laws. The special counsel stated before a national audience that the president could face obstruction of justice charges the day he leaves office. There are at least a dozen cases from the Mueller investigation still working their way through various regions of the Department of Justice.
You might think these truths—and they are absolute facts—are what the title of this essay is referring to. I would never let you—or myself—off so easy. There are more painful truths a much smaller percentage of Americans can handle. For instance, our country is hurtling into insolvency. Our nation’s want of education made it particularly susceptible to Russian election interference. Russia and other foreign powers think of the U.S. as a large, highly entertaining cockfight and its citizens as roosters. Life expectancy in our country has peaked and is declining in certain socioeconomic groups. Glacier melting, atmospheric CO2 concentration , and deforestation are accelerating well beyond anticipated rates and are quickly pushing our country and the rest of the world toward the point of no return.
But even these truths can be sloughed off on a good day with a shot of Stolichnaya or, better still, ignored completely every single day while playing Donut County.
However, here is a truth so unpleasant few can even comprehend it: The left and right share the same fundamental fallacy, and that fallacy will likely ensure the end of this country. I call it the hands off fallacy. This is the idea that there exists a system that will create prosperity, harmony, and general well being that does not require insane amounts of sacrifice, or really any sacrifice at all.
For the left, the idea is that significant confiscation and redistribution of private wealth will guarantee a thriving citizenry. For the right, the idea is that the so-called free market will satisfy all needs. For both the left and the right, the belief masks a deep-seated personal wish to bear no ultimate responsibility for real outcomes in the real world. The right and left are emotionally unified in their desire to avoid all personal accountability with the possible exception of their immediate family. Given that families on both ends of the spectrum dissolve at the rate of hundreds of thousands per year, it’s understandable that these same people want to minimize any further culpability. In other words, I gave at the office.
The truth is a reasonably regulated free market and an intelligently activist government are both necessary for a thriving populace but are both far from sufficient. In my brief half-century or so on this planet I’ve seen careerism become the primary religion in the United States of America. This paradigm shift has been driven mostly by materialism and social competition. And as the length of the workweek has grown, so has the rationalization of its preeminence.
As we rely increasingly on GDP and related economic indicators as a measure of our well being, justifying treacherously long workweeks becomes easier. As every hour of marketing car detailing kits on the internet adds something, however infinitesimal, to the gross domestic product, each of these hours was arguably spent enhancing the welfare of the United States of America. Even from a leftist point of view, the infinitesimal additional tax revenue produced from that hour helps to fund some anonymous program somewhere.
It doesn’t matter that somewhere else a spouse isn’t being accompanied, a child isn’t being coached, a friend isn’t being comforted, a fellow parishioner isn’t being counseled, or a neighbor’s son isn’t being mentored. Sorry, but we are busy here racking up points for the Bureau of Labor Statistics. We may multitask and take your call for a few minutes, but for the most part please leave us alone. Go tweet your problems to the government, to the free market, or both. Just get the hell out of my office and my precious head space.
Before chat rooms, social media, and the utter prevalence of internet porn, there were thousands upon thousands of church and civic groups since withered or outright evaporated. There was a tacit understanding that whatever happened before and after work was as or more important than what happened during it. It was far, far from paradise, but people milled about on stoops and porches and front lawns and made efforts to plug people into real networks involving real hands, feet, eyes, ears and brains.
Community involvement was not an optional extracurricular activity to flesh out a resume. When someone was in trouble, experts and not-so-experts from the block and down the road received word of mouth, tips, phone calls and intervened. Unofficial committees of Janice’s aunt, Maurice’s brother, and the substitute teacher from apartment 4B convened over coffee in the small lobby near the laundry room and figured out how to help the latchkey kid from apartment 3C who seemed malnourished and angry.
Community sweat equity had no formulas, no officialdom, no tangible reward, and could be a pain in the ass. In loco parentis or a feeling of assumed responsibility was hard work that didn’t seem much harder than any other productive norm.
And now it’s largely gone. Replaced by the tunnel vision of some office or telecommute where single-mindedness is interrupted only by an overnight order on overstock.com. Momentary lapses of vague guilt are quelled by the notion that there is a perfect system the other side just doesn’t get. The more we buy into this system of systems, the hands off fallacy, the longer we stay soullessly glued to our bread and butter, and the longer we stay soullessly glued to our bread and butter the more the madness of it all has to be treated symptomatically by spending our few remaining minutes of potential community time watching music reaction videos on YouTube. It’s a slippery slope, and we have already slipped. When you see kids in cages at the border and all you can do is curse Trump or Pelosi before resuming Angry Birds, you know you’re at the nadir.
Though damn close at points, this is not an essay of pure resignation and hopelessness. We all know Americans who have taken in struggling homeless community college students and hosted Venezuelan twenty-somethings on travel visas to help them send Bitcoin funds back home. We all know people who entirely below the radar tutor impoverished kids in algebra and English. We all know people who hold banquets every year to fund local scholarships. We all know people constantly rounding up decent used clothing and moving it surreptitiously into the hands of overburdened single parents. Right?
We probably need to quadruple this sort of activity to begin to repair the fabric that has been torn away for decades by the vacuous system of systems and the self-serving substitutes for thinking, feeling and acting that go with it. Very little happening politically these days is going to make America great again or great for the first time. The idea that a simple shift to the left or shift to the right will accomplish anything vaguely resembling a problem-free, accountability-free utopia is the biggest hoax of all.
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