1968-2018: We've Not Come Far Enough

I watched CNN’s four-part series on 1968, the year I graduated high school and began college. Looking back to that place in time 50 years ago stirred up more emotions than I thought it would, which is probably a good thing, but the events seen through the series’ retrospective microscope were, frankly, unsettling and reopened frustrations I’d long-since put away. I think one of the few things I can say with a smile is that our music was incredible.

Every generation has its theme music, and I don’t begrudge today’s generation their affection for the music coming from 21st century composers and artists; but to those of us who got through the 60s intact, I think it is fair to say we did so with the help of songs that defined our restlessness and our unrest, the hope we were maybe on the right track, the visions for equality and justice and love, and of the dreams we so desperately needed to achieve. But music alone does not lift a nation to it’s sought-after heights; to do that, a county needs unity of purpose and faith in something yet unseen but possible. Singing “All You Need is Love,” does not perforce bring love into a world of hate.

I’m trying to write something sensible about this 50-year-old path of broken hopes, but, having lived it, I am having trouble putting it down without sounding trite or bitter. Why do we keep making the same mistakes? Why have we allowed the lessons of 50 years ago to not only haunt and revisit us, but to make things worse than they were then?

Our hopes were high; we believed we could stand on the shoulders of the Greatest Generation and be even greater in homage to their sacrifices. If our parents worked so hard, and fought so hard, and endured so much in order to lift us to a better future, was it not reasonable to believe we would exceed their efforts with our own children…with our own country? We not only failed to be greater, we made the world worse for our children and our grandchildren.

Who can honestly look at what passes for national leadership today...what passes for world peace today...what passes for education today...what passes for economic fairness today...what passes for social justice today...what passes for security today...what passes for dialogue today, and say with a straight face we are better now than we were in 1968? Thanks to social media, we are just louder now, we scream more now, we hide our true selves more now; we hurt others more now because we can do so in hand-held anonymity.

George Wallace of 1968 and Donald Trump of 2018: Two bigotry-stained pieces of toilet paper torn from the same shabby and shameful roll. What progress is that? Vietnam and Afghanistan (and Iraq and Syria and a dozen other killing fields): tragedies whose heroes came, and are coming, home under American flags. What progress is that? 

Black men and women tear-gassed, pushed to the ground or shoved into a pane of glass or arrested or shot for just existing where whites don’t want them to exist whether in1968 or 2018. What kind of progress is that? 

Children not only being killed in our schools, but children expecting to be killed in our schools. What kind of progress is that? Let’s not even get into the damn wall and the terror of children being pulled away from their parents—the shame of that is unfathomable.

What is happening is the normalization of aberrant behavior by public figures. It is not a matter of being "easily offended." It is a matter of being insulted by language that should have been deleted long ago from every dictionary. If I used the N word anywhere in my life, or characterized a black person as an ape or monkey, or suggested that all Southerners are Crackers or rednecks, or decided to use epithets to describe Hispanics, Asians, or Jews or Muslims...I would expect to bear the full brunt of an outraged society.

I've never considered grabbing a woman by....nor minimizing sexual assault...nor criticized a reporter with a disability...nor paid $130,000 as hush money...nor lied every single day to the public...nor used any office I ever held for my own vendettas. I would never have used Memorial Day to praise my accomplishments as Trump did on Monday.

The list goes on, and one cannot come at this issue as if it was just normal behavior.

I'm not thin-skinned. I'm angry, frustrated, hurt, and upset that anyone...after so many years of our working to establish a fair and equitable union...would find pleasure or acceptance in the social and political disaster that is facing our nation today. And before you think I'm just another liberal who is whining about this, look around at all the pain that exists in almost every corner of our country and tell me if a mere label--right, middle, center, liberal, conservative, etc.--makes that pain any fucking better. It does not. If you're not going to help fix the problems, then at least respect the opinions of those of us who, no matter how small and unimportant we are, are trying to make a difference.  Don't normalize the disaster that is looming over America.

And for goodness' sake, don’t point to someone like Roseanne Barr and claim all she did was exercise her First Amendment rights.

This is not a First Amendment issue in any way shape for form except to the degree that it is as close to yelling "fire" in a theater as one can get. If Barr had said that about a private citizen...just a black person on the street...it would be actionable for slander and defamation or humiliation. That her target was a public figure makes no difference in my book...it was a vile, repugnant, and hurtful statement, based on her deep-seated and horribly-flawed world view.

Barr and Trump and their adherents are looking for theaters filled with people like me in which to yell fire...they love to yell it...they want to burn those theaters down...they love to disrupt and shift the center of gravity of personal, community, and national discourse. That's not a First Amendment right; that's anarchy when it begins to swarm and grow.

The fires—real and metaphorical—of the 1960s should have died, cooled to ash and blown away long before my children were born. Yet, having watched 1968 and revisited my memories—good and not so good—I believe there are still hot embers remaining, embers that will ignite the tinder of racism, economic inequality, failing education, ageism, distrust, and spittle-flecked vitriol. If we are incapable of action, those patches of flame will burst forth and consume us as they did 50 years ago.

To Fix the U.S., We Must First Restore Trust

I was asked to respond to this recent question posed on Quora: "What one thing must America improve to avoid serious trouble in the not too distant future?"

The restoration of trust between and among individuals, the restoration of trust among the electorate and local, state, and the national government, as well as the restoration of trust between consumers, suppliers, producers, distributors, and advertisers, is vital to the overall restoration of reasonable and constructive dialogue across the socio-political-economic-humanitarian spectrum of America’s way of life.

If we continue down our path of becoming a nation of mistrustful strangers—distrusting those we elect and the process by which we elect them, distrusting those who protect us and our communities, distrusting those who inform us through print, video, and electronic media, distrusting those institutions responsible for educating our children, and distrusting those from whom we buy the goods and services necessary to feed, clothe, house, and provide medicines and health care, we will only see the widening of the chasm dividing us at almost every level of communication and human interaction.

My point of view is informed by a real and deep-seated feeling that there is an evolutionary sea change in America’s — and Americans’— interpretation of the founders’ expression of unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, a vision that, even if flawed in the details, was admirable on its face. For the record, I embrace the philosophies of both John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (with a touch of Hobbes)—I believe it is possible to be a romantic and a realist, a defender of naturally-endowed individual rights, the value of one’s own labor, and an advocate for a responsive government that mediates social and economic disparities.

Let us admit, without rancor, finger-pointing, and self-flagellation, that our republic is imperfect. Let us admit that our institutions of government, faith, consumerism, media, and security are inherently flawed structures created for and by inherently flawed people. I encourage such admission because the evidence of our failings is manifest beneath the broad arc of our history; we cannot escape the truth of our transgressions. A short list of what we have not done right may be appropriate:

• Yes, the founders were white, male, privileged, and often pompous.
• Yes there were founders who were slave owners.
• Yes there were deals cut on the back of slavery and the three-fifths compromise was an immoral expediency brokered to move the Constitution toward ratification.
• Yes, slavery continued to enrich white landowners and paved the path to Civil War on the bodies and souls of an enslaved and voiceless population.
• Yes, Lincoln was imperfect and overstepped his executive powers in the heat of war.
• Yes, reconstruction brought pain and corruption to a defeated South.
• Yes, the railroad barons took terrible advantage of cheap Asian and Irish labor in the rush to build the steel rail links between the East and West coasts.
• Yes, corruption and abuse of power ruled too many American cities, and local politics were rife with cheaters, scammers, thugs, and violent men whose intentions were vile and self-enriching.
• Yes, the rise of yellow journalism and its salacious editorializing threatened the dialogue of truthful news gathering.
• Yes, Jim Crow was a blight on our history.
• Yes, segregation was (and, in my opinion, remains) a blight on our history.
• Yes, we unconstitutionally imprisoned tens of thousands of our fellow Americans in internment camps during World War II.
• Yes, Vietnam was a mistake of devastating proportions.
• Yes women were the largest disenfranchised portion of our population until well into the 20th century, and they remain less-than-equal in too many respects.
• Yes, any form of police brutality and overreach of authority is wrong. Yes, human trafficking happens within our national, state, and local borders.
• Yes, drug abuse is on the rise.
• Yes, guns continue to take the lives of our children.
• Yes, we disproportionately imprison young black men.
• Yes, hate groups continue to defecate on the precious fabric of our society.
• Yes, every president in the 20th century (and, so far, into the 21st century) was/is imperfect and capable of great error of judgment and, in some cases, demonstrated their imperfections and hubris by word and deed, a true malfeasance in office.

The list of “yes-we-were/are-wrong-or-misguided” is a long one and I believe most Americans acknowledge the flawed characteristics of what is by all measures a messy form of government and society. And in looking at this list, we have to resist the urge to cherry-pick those we want to defend and those we want to pillory.

The list of “but-we-are-capable-of-greatness-and-humanity” is even longer. The problem with writing out even a portion of a “greatness” list is that it will not be trusted by a segment of America that has become desensitized to counterpoint and debate, a portion of society that is unwilling to listen to and process a positive message because of an assumption that the messenger is biased or elitist or uninformed and represents a tribal point of view antithetical to other tribes’ points of view.

I recommend Jonah Goldberg’s new book, “Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism; Nationalism, and Identity Politics is Destroying American Democracy.” To many of my readers, the irony of this recommendation is that Goldberg and I do not often occupy the same political stage—his is a conservative voice, mine trends liberal, but we do see eye-to-eye on this issue of an America in dire jeopardy due to a loss of communication, a diversion of values, and a retrenchment of tribal habits unflattering to, and destructive of, our social-political-faith fabric.

I want to be very clear…I am in no way using the term “tribal” as a racial pejorative, lest my critics leap on this word in its most useless and inflammatory meaning. The rise of unbridled social media, coupled with a selfish or self-absorbed populace (individual or group), polarized news media and/or punditry, and paralyzed, election-centered representative government all contribute to tribal divisions—or the assumption of tribal divisions.

And therein lies the problem—tribalism engenders mistrust which in turn engenders silence among all parties, and that silence creates a vacuum which sucks all the potential objectivity out of social discourse. To be clear, we are not becoming a nation of untrustworthy people, but a nation of people unwilling to put our faith in once-trustworthy institutions and once-accepted norms and traditions which, in the past, provided sound footing for national progress. We are becoming separatists in too many senses of the word. We are separating ourselves from all forums of open, safe, and mutually-beneficial dialogue because we no longer trust that our points of view will be taken on their merits and discussed without subjective attack.

We have created, instead, social media forums that thrive on attack and uninformed subjectivity, forums that squander whatever “fair play” their creators touted, forums that, within two or three posts of a single thread, devolve into shouting matches filled with sound and fury and become meaningless or, worse, emotionally devastating. These tribally-fueled forums exist not just on social media—they exist in everyday discourse: in town hall meetings, on cable and network news, in editorials, and, I am sad to say, increasingly on college campuses. If we cannot trust our institutions of higher learning to be fields of non-judgmental exchanges of myriad ideas, what then is the future of epistemological examination of anything for the coming generations of students?

To return to the original question, Americans must overcome the decades-long destruction of institutional and personal trust that once characterized the interactions between the government and the governed, between people of differing opinions who retreat from discourse rather than engage in helpful, gracious, respectful discussions. If we cannot reclaim trust—the north star toward which our compass once pointed—we will continue to veer far from the course upon which we set the nation so long ago.

Morality, Myopia, and Misplaced Loyalty: Normalization of Attitudes

Three items to discuss: The looming confirmation vote for CIA Director nominee Gina Haspel; White House Chief of Staff John Kelly’s remarks about immigrants; and the president’s public dressing down of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen.

Haspel

With respect to Ms. Haspel’s nomination, I’ve been on a merry-go-round ride with this. My initial reaction to her nomination was positive (and I was a bit surprised at the administration’s apparent clear-thinking on the nomination). Like all Americans, I have a stake in the success of the men and women of the CIA to perform their various missions under leadership that never wavers from the overarching goal of protecting us from those bad actors who are working every day to harm us. A 30-year CIA veteran with Ms. Haspel’s resume would, in principle, be a big plus to the CIA, our domestic intelligence community (IC) and our allied intelligence services.

My own experience in that kind of work is limited to knowing well one man, my father, who, along with his other public duties as a uniformed officer in the United States Air Force, was also trained in some level of spycraft. He exercised that training for much of his active-duty career. During the height of the Cold War, he commanded a unit of airmen—pilots and crews flying intelligence-gathering missions—whose clandestine flights more than once resulted in rarely-disclosed deaths. He also had an unspecified (to this date) role in intelligence collection during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. His interface with the CIA was never fully revealed to me, even as he neared his death and I had my own security clearances that gave me access to many interesting things. Whenever I would probe a bit deeper into his generalized narrative about his work, he would usually give me his wry smile and change the subject. Much of what he did, saw, and commanded went with him to Arlington National Cemetery in 2003.

Perhaps it is the wishful thinking of a faithful son, but I believe my father never would have countenanced torture—in any form—as an intelligence gathering method. He had a fine moral compass that I know pointed unwaveringly to a place far beyond his West Point motto of “Duty, Honor, Country.” Army Field Manual or not, I don’t believe there was any language written by man—under any government-crafted, judicially-sanctioned disguise of legality—that would have moved my dad’s moral needle away from that ever-present lodestone of conscience. Yes, he took human life when he was a fighter pilot in World War II; yes, he was prepared to do so again during the Cold War had that been necessary. But, given the chance to put a prisoner of war on a slanted table, cover his mouth with a towel, and pour buckets of water into his face to simulate the onset of death, would he have done that? No. Nor could he have been a part of a chain of command that permitted such torture. I knew my dad; he would speak conviction to power and be fully prepared to walk away from his national service.

So we come back to Ms. Haspel. During the public portion of her Senate hearing, I wanted to hear her take a strong moral stand against torture, and to acknowledge the immorality of what she oversaw in Thailand in the early 2000s. In her Senate testimony she said, “My moral compass is strong. I would not allow C.I.A. to undertake activity that I thought was immoral, even if it was technically legal. I would absolutely not permit it.”

Haspel said leadership is about learning and growing with new understanding. I would remind her leadership is also about setting an unshakeable, unequivocal moral standard when it comes to refusing to cruelly manipulate the lives of others—enemies or not.

Perhaps that moral standard is, as she intimated, within her and somehow inexpressible in public—I’d like to give her the benefit of a doubt because she is eminently qualified for the job. But I can’t. Morality is not nuanced; it is not about convenient equivocation or parsing context in front of the cameras. It is a driving force—neither secular nor religious—that supplies the actionable blueprint for a compassionate, humane, civilization or society. Without that blueprint, any other plan to move humanity from the mud to the stars is bound to fail.

Kelly

Now, concerning John Kelly’s unfortunate remarks about immigrants and their shortcomings as productive members of our society. Many more eloquent voices have already pitched in on this, including my friend and Washington Post columnist, Karen Tumulty whose column noted the ironic history of John Kelly’s Irish heritage and the rise of the “No Nothing Party.” Tumulty wrote, in part, “

“It would be disturbing to hear any person in a position of trust express such lack of regard for the fundamental values that have made this country what it is. But in Kelly’s case, it was particularly egregious because … well, because his name is Kelly.

His ancestors came from Ireland, as mine did. He grew up on Bigelow Street in the Brighton neighborhood of Boston, where reminders of his heritage — and of the opportunities made possible by his immigrant forebears — would have been everywhere he looked.” Karen closes with this: “There are still Know-Nothings among us. They are the people who forget their own history.”

I cannot do better than Karen in expressing my disappointment at John Kelly’s sudden myopia when it comes to looking toward the potential of the immigrants and their children who are coming here not to take advantage indiscriminately and selfishly of America’s largess, but who are here to open doors to education for themselves and their children. They want nothing more than to step across the thresholds of new job opportunities—low paying as they might be—and to one day be able to try to achieve something better in a country where striving for something better defines our nation’s existence!

It is a cliché to fall back on the “Plant a tree not to give shade to yourself, but to give shade to your children and your children’s children.” But the truth of the matter is, when Americans open the door to those for whom all doors have been bolted shut by despots, gangs, kidnapping, murder, and failing economies, we open the doors to untapped opportunities for the next generation of immigrants whose heritages enrich us all. John Kelly doesn’t seem to want to plant a single tree…and that’s unfortunate and shortsighted.

Nielsen

Finally, a brief note on Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, who took a bit of a hit the other day when president Trump singled her out for a public flogging in front of her peers, and, ultimately, the country. I don’t know all the dynamics, or all the facts—that’s my full disclosure. I can say I’m not a big fan of anyone who supports separating children from their families at the border, so I’m not giving Ms. Nielsen any sort of pass. What I do sense is that Secretary Nielsen was targeted by the Great Bully in a way that was meant to demean and embarrass. That the Great Bully did that is no surprise—it is his modus operandi, and we seem to have become inured to it, no matter who the target is. And that’s the problem, folks.

We are normalizing our personal and national reaction to the bullying violence to which the men and women in Trump’s sphere are routinely subjected. Trump’s method of berating, gas-lighting, and spewing innuendo until the target gives in or gives up is not now, nor has it ever been, what we should accept as normal. Ever. The consequence of accepting bullying as a normal way of forcing people to act the way the bully wants them to act is that it inures—numbs may be a better word--witnesses and passersby from taking a stand against the bully when things get really get bad. Eventually, people begin walking past the scene of the crime with nary a peep of objection or outrage. When that happens, bullying victims begin to believe they have no where to turn for help and comfort and options. A bullying victim without any peer or advocacy support—or other non-judgmental options—has little recourse, and quiet desperation becomes his or her norm.

I don’t know Ms. Nielsen, beyond news profiles and seeing her at Congressional hearings and during the occasional cable news interviews. But I do know bullies and their victims—my own story of being a victim has been well told. When I read what Mr. Trump did to her, I wanted to call her, to tell her to stand up, tell the president he had no right to speak to her like that, and walk out and not look back. That would have been one powerful message (if only I had her number).

In Defense of John McCain

I’m going to make this post as simple as I can, though it may make some people who believe that political persuasions—party loyalty—allow them to take umbrage at what is to follow. To them, I say, tough…you may leave the room anytime.

Shortly after I began working as a speechwriter for one of four Secretaries of Veterans Affairs I served over a 12-year period, I sat down with my boss to discuss a speech he was slated to give on July 20th. The speech venue was a reception on the deck of a Naval warship anchored in a major East Coast harbor; the time was mid-evening. The Secretary and I were batting some themes around, but we had not found that sweet spot of a speech that would both motivate and illuminate. We sat in awkward silence for a few minutes, and then, as I looked at the date of speech, I realized it was going to occur on the anniversary of America’s first Moon landing.

I wanted to tie that world-changing event into the Secretary’s remarks, so I asked him, “Do you remember what you were doing the day Neil Armstrong set his foot on the surface of the Moon?” The Secretary nearly blew the question off…but then something hit him, and he looked away, looked very far away from me. Out his office window. To another place and time. 

After what seemed like several minutes, he turned away from the window—the view from the office of the Secretary of Veterans Affairs is one of the most spectacular in all of Washington, overlooking as it does the White House, the Washington Monument, the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials, the Potomac, and the Pentagon and Arlington National Cemetery beyond. He began speaking in a voice that I’d not heard before—he was a friend of mine from an earlier time, but I’d not heard such a somber, heart-heavy voice from him—and he said, 

“I was standing in a rice paddy in Vietnam, placing the bodies of young men into an evac helicopter. Their blood ran like ribbons of honor across my arms.” 

My boss…my friend…the Secretary, was in tears.

In that moment, the man sitting across his desk from me was something far greater than just a Cabinet Secretary; he was the avatar-witness for the unsung deeds of every man and woman who served with dignity—despite their fear—and sacrificed their blood and the nation’s treasure on a far-flung battlefield. He was speaking for the 58,220 dead, and the tens of thousands of wounded from that war…and he was speaking for John McCain. And damn any man or woman today who dares speak ill of the dead or wounded or imprisoned during that terrible conflict.

So it is that I point a damning finger at two people so despicable as to merit the condemnation of every American honored to carry that label of citizenship. Let me cite just one source, USA Today, for reporting comments unbecoming any American whose birthright was paid for by the nation’s veterans:

“A White House official mocked Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and his battle with the deadly disease during a meeting Thursday, The Hill reported. And earlier a guest on Fox News Business implied that McCain betrayed U.S. secrets when he was tortured as a prisoner of war.

"It doesn't matter, he's dying anyway," press aide Kelly Sadler said about McCain's opposition to CIA nominee Gina Haspel at a meeting of White House communications staffers, according to an unnamed source cited by The Hill's Jordan Fabian.

On Wednesday, McCain urged his fellow senators to reject Haspel's nomination because he does not believe she adequately answered for her role in the CIA's torture program after the 9/11 attacks during a hearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee.

During a discussion about McCain's opposition to Haspel and his opinion that torture is not effective, retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney told Fox Business host Charles Payne that torture "worked on John."

"That’s why they call him ‘Songbird John,'" McInerney told Payne.

To Kelly Sadler and General McInerney I say, “To hell with you both…I hope with all my heart that you find some suffering so great in your life that you will look back on your callous, mean-spirited, and senseless comments and beg to be forgiven for your stupidity. To the people who hired you, or who support your vile views, to hell with you too. 

 And I hope you will find there is no forgiveness for your transgression against a defenseless man who never broke, who never gave up, who never once lifted a finger against you, who served his country with honor and dignity, and whose name will be remembered long after your tombstones are corroded and blown away like the desert dust you are. 

There is a hall of honor waiting John McCain; for Sadler and McInerney, there will no place at all.

A Balanced Culture? How About A Balanced Nation First

A poster on Quora asked, "What will the balanced culture look like in America when it finally settles?"

The question presupposes some nationally-accepted measure of agreement on the term “balanced culture,” and a corollary that such a culture will be viewed from a common perspective. Neither condition has ever, does, or will ever exist in a multicultural pluralistic society like ours. What does “balanced” mean to you, to me, to the family next door, or the small town tucked into the hills of southern Missouri? Who is the arbiter of such a definition? There is no common definition, and even if our society writ large achieved some sort of stasis in which all cultural attributes (not differences, but attributes) were homogenized, the resulting national image would still be a colorful patchwork quilt, not a seamless bolt of bland culture-neutral fabric.

To the second aspect of the question—which suggests that something will “finally settle.” It is my deep belief, and fervent hope, that America will never finally settle with respect to our cultural diversity. I celebrate every highway and country lane of our vast and complex cultural roadwork, and I try to revel in the ever-changing landscape that has been whizzing past me as I’ve traveled throughout America for 69 years. But there have been detours and disappointments...some which I are in my rearview mirror, but others which now, once again, are dead ahead.

When I was growing up in the 1950s, the America I knew was mostly white and deeply flawed in its ignorant and often-shameful dismissal of Black Americans (we weren’t all that much better when it came to Jews, Hispanics, Asians, Eastern Europeans, Middle Easterners, or Pacific Islanders). For every “Leave it to Beaver” household of modest wealth and privilege, there were dozens of households where poverty, poor education, poor health, malnutrition, and desperation opened and closed every day. And for each one of those households, there were many others that looked down on them with bigoted glasses tinted with hatred and framed in ignorance. The idea of cultural diversity was anathema to millions of Americans who sought refuge behind their blood-soaked shields of racism.

By the 1960s, when I was beginning to move away from the comforts of my privileged life and into the world of a large university and work, the ground was shifting beneath our nation’s feet. Issues of race and poverty, haves and have-nots, justice and injustice, long-buried beneath the carefully graded surface of white America began to crack the skin of our social conscience—like the lava breaking through in fissures in Hawaii, bubbling up in unexpected places—and we were forced to look at our society in new, and often uncomfortable ways.

The Civil Rights movement, the Great Society, reforms in education, the nascent tremblings of sexual revolution, among other important topics, were supposed to bring the “balance” suggested in the Quora question. I can recall thinking as a teenager in the late 1960s that the nation was on its way to a new Enlightenment, perhaps a Renaissance of thought and behavior worthy of the Founder’s fondest dreams. We were on the cusp of our two-hundredth anniversary of independence, and maybe, just maybe, we were also on the verge of getting our act together and moving away from divisiveness and toward comity and a common cause.

But then came the blind idiocy of Martin Luther King, Jr.s’s and Bobby Kennedy’s assassinations in 1968, and the senselessness of Kent State in 1970, the Nixonian nightmare, the riots that burned in so many cities, and the increasing volume of the drumbeats of Vietnam and the long, sad lines of coffins arriving from that conflict. Overnight, it seemed, we were a nation in retrograde, sliding down a slope we had muddied all on our own…and what hopes there were for a balanced society lay piled in a heap at the bottom of that pit of stupidity.

Over the next thirty years, we, like the algae from which humankind arose, slowly re-evolved, found some traction in the founding ideals, and began pulling ourselves out of the mud and into a gathering light of awareness not just of self, but of selflessness. We began to rethink our prejudices and our hubris, and, for a short while we looked a bit like the nation to which we aspired—welcoming, embracing, less intolerant, perhaps more respected beyond our shores.

But that was just ephemera. After September 11, 2001, the ancient strains of tribalism reasserted themselves, but with a heat and thrust that was unlike anything my generation had seen before; old labels—conservative, liberal, Republican, Democrat, progressive, independent—turned themselves inside out and upside down, becoming unrecognizable to anyone who once leaned with assurance on the form and function of their parties or political leanings. And culturalism was caught in the crossfire.

Just as the Great Rift Valley is slowly, inexorably tearing Eastern Africa away from the main African continent, so, too, are America’s political parties, special interests, hate groups, and polarizing social media ripping the nation asunder—sometimes literally by cleaving families--parents from children--at our border, sometimes by splitting otherwise reasonable neighbors apart with an ax soaked in the venomous potion of political legerdemain, false narratives, and outright lies.

The ideals of John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau—empiricism and romanticism existing in a necessary tension to assure the rights of the individual while guiding the operation of an overarching government—seem for now to be fading in the grass, trampled deeper by the unshod hoofs of apocalypse-bound horses, ridden to a froth by crude, conscienceless would-be leaders ill-equipped intellectually, morally, ethically, and socially to recognize the damage they are doing.

The cultural balance that is the point of the initial question, “What will the balanced culture look like in America when it finally settles?” if at all achievable from any perspective or by any definition, must wait, perhaps decades, for the very framework of our democracy to be righted and re-placed on a firm foundation of mutual trust, cooperation, compromise, and shared accountability. And, as I noted above, even once we have (or if we have) reestablished a framework for cultural accommodation and celebration, it will not be a dull banner of colorless cloth…it will be a vibrant living fabric, iridescent and exciting to behold.