It’s worth reading the original accusations in Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence that we mark today; many sound amazingly relevant, especially if Trump manages to gain power again.
Like our forbears of 1776, we are once again called to resist tyranny. But today, we know that nonviolent resistance is more effective and longer lasting than armed struggle. And we know more than 200 ways to be nonviolent activists. In the pre-Internet, pre-pandemic era. Gene Sharp identified 198 ways. Many more have been found in recent years. The challenges are figuring out what makes strategic sense against a corrupt Supreme Court, how to organize to prevent a Trump victory, and what to do if he does take power again.
Americans think of ourselves as a “can-do” people. Over the course of its history, the US has often been in the vanguard, with the rest of the world playing catch-up later. The US was especially good at technology, pioneering innovations ranging from the interchangeable parts that made mass production possible to the amazing moon missions that took less than seven years from JFK’s speech at Rice University to Neil Armstrong’s “giant leap for mankind” as he became the first person ever to set foot on the lunar surface, to enormous leadership in green energy from the 1970s into the 1990s.
And Americans often see ourselves as the greatest country in the world. In many ways, that image is correct. We have amazing natural and scenic resources, a wide diversity of people, cultures, ecosystems, and more. We are very resilient, even scrappy at times. We have a democracy that has not only lasted but expanded. We’ve birthed may popular movements for justice and liberation, and experiments in new ways to form community, that went around the world.
And despite the perception of American exceptionalism–that we’re a beacon to the rest of the world–there are many areas where the US is far, far below “the best in the world.” This could be a much longer list, but here are a few examples:
Although US police forces are far more heavily armed than those in many other countries, our crime levels are worse than most countries; we are the 50th most dangerous out of 132 countries ranked.
59.5 percent stemmed from a race/ethnicity/ancestry bias.
18.6 percent were motivated by religious bias.
16.9 percent resulted from sexual-orientation bias.
2.2 percent stemmed from gender-identity bias.
2.1 percent resulted from bias against disabilities.
0.7 percent (58 offenses) were prompted by gender bias.
My guess is that these terrible statistics don’t even count police murders of people of color.
What is the Real America?
Technically, America is much more than the US. It’s everything from the northern tip of Alaska to the southern tip of Argentina–and Americans live anywhere within. But right now, I’m just talking about the US.
And the answer is…all of the above, and more. Our diversity is part of our resilience and our strength. But our education (in school and out, and that includes social media) tends to sharpen our existing divisions and make it hard to find people who disagree with us–let alone have those meaningful, structured conversations that explore how we can work together with people who are not like us.
And it hasn’t helped that the current president has repeatedly and publicly embraced racism, misogyny, ableism, and difference, while promoting suppression of real news and science, monolithic social mores that ignore or (sometimes even physically) attack different perspectives, and dictatorships in other countries. A president who has put children in cages, essentially closed the borders to legitimate asylum seekers (long before COVID), slashed the safety net, appointed a likely child abuser to the Supreme Court, and made a mockery of our cherished democracy.
This Moment: A Time for Action
Many things are changing in our society this year:
The pandemic has changed the way we interact–and created a ridiculous ideologically based divide between those who take precautions and those who don’t
Anger around police mistreatment has created a mass movement
COVID has shown that our entire society can pivot, that all those “impossible”changes around issues from climate change to racism are actually less drastic than what we’ve already changed
In short, the cauldron is bubbling. What emerges depends on what we put in–but this could be a time to Make America Great, finally.