Maybe it’s the result of middle age or the loss of youthful idealism that is coloring my outlook, or perhaps there has in reality been a shift in our national priorities, but I feel like we as a nation need to take a good hard look at ourselves.I can confidently tell you that most parents I know would swallow hard if they witnessed their children being motivated in life solely by power, greed, possessions, and blind self interest. And yet somehow we find this behavior perfectly tolerable as our national modus operandi. America seems to have come to define democracy as the freedom to do any damn thing we want without consequence. We protect our right to profit without condition as if it were as precious as the freedom to speak. We covet our possessions as if they embody life itself, and we blindly cling to the dogma that America IS it’s economy. I mean, I understand that our prosperity enables us to experience a quality of life worth defending. But, aren’t we more than just our material wealth? Don’t we want our cultural priorities to transcend consumption and profit? Can’t we collectively value peace, health, joy, compassion, and awareness without being so paranoid as to simplistically fear becoming a nation of socialists? Is it really acceptable that our government is being held hostage by corporations and driven by little more than GREED and POWER? Why have "We The People" settled for so little, and when are we going to escape this cycle of politicized, ego driven, representation and demand selfless, intelligent, and conscientious governance?
My point is that we are a good and fortunate citizenry who out of cynicism tolerate far too much and demand far too little of ourselves, and our nation. Somehow we need to find an honorable path forward together; striving to be our better selves even if it means that we fall flat on our faces. Tilting at windmills isn’t a bad thing and maybe, just maybe, we’ll all be better off for trying.
* title from the lyrics of Leonard Cohen’s Democracy
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