Mine was a welcoming nation. “Give me your tired, your poor,” urged the lady in the harbor,
Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedYour huddled masses yearning to breathe free,The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,I lift my lamp beside the golden door!
We had given much of ourselves – in two world wars, which we could have sat out, and the Marshall Plan, restoring even our foes, and the UN and NATO and cooperative agencies, and it felt good to give. We had the confidence to be generous. We knew in our bones, by bettering others’ lives, we were bettering our own.
And now?
Stay away. Keep out. Less for you so more for me. Screw the downtrodden, hungry, diseased – it’s their own damn fault. We can’t afford meals for tots – are you kidding? Gated community is the way to go!
I gulp at who we’ve become. What soured us? Gramps used to be such a sweetheart and now such a grouch!
Herewith a primer on the symptoms differentiating these personality types.
Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedOutward-facing Inward-facingEmbracing SuspiciousPlenty ScarcityGives GrabsReflective ImperiousMerciful PunitiveCollaborative CombativeGrateful SpitefulPlacid PugnaciousDog-lover Not (Henry’s contribution)Apologetic ApoplecticCommunitarian AuthoritarianWE ME
How during my lifetime did our personality rot? How did “Ask what you can do for your country?” curdle into “America First!”
No answer suffices. But a few lines of inquiry:
We lost the “lift of a driving dream”. Without murderous villains to monopolize our attention, we drifted into fussing about ourselves. My dad and his classmates graduated to Hitler; my class to hair-length, sexual mores, legalizing pot.
As communities dissolved, we clustered into like-minded compounds. We forgot “it takes a village,” as villages vanished.
Money became meaning, a tawdry substitute.
As religions unraveled, so did our conduct.
The gap between the rich and the rest kept widening, till most of the nation felt dissed and pissed.
Lying became SOP – “They all do it.”
Young brains were gobbled by irresistible machines.
Love became a mood, no longer a mandate.
Could any individual or event have forestalled this spiritual debacle? I doubt it. Our little lives are dinghies in the ocean, which must obey the waves. Only too late do we discover who we are.
Tomorrow is our only field of action. What now? Any day’s headlines make us feel doomed. The audacity of this despotism astonishes. Surrender tempts. Why bother even trying?
Despair, while natural, is irrational. We must do what we can while we can, make the most of our chance even if it feels slim. “What we can” means all we can. If you think there’s nothing you can do, think again. Every voice adds to the chorus, every penny to the resistance.
As dread increases, I sense myself growing more militant, adamant. Congratulations to the Nameless One for making himself as captivating as a fatal cancer. Cancer commands attention, like it or not.
The worse the news gets, the better I like it, for every violation ejects another soldier from his platoon. The climactic confrontation approaches: them or us: Good versus Evil: We versus Me. Every day more blood – in Minnesota, Oregon, Mississippi – more preposterous lies and distractions – Venezuela, Greenland, Iran. Every day swagger, like spit, in our eyes. Will soldiers shoot their neighbors in obedience to a lunatic? Will all the generals salute?
The powers of evil want to drub us, baffle us, dishearten us, break so much so completely we lose hope. They may succeed. But not if the majority, the persuasive insuperable majority, combines into a fist, and says, No, enough!