What has happened to us as a nation. We've always had our differences. We've always had our disputes. Some of them have been petty, others have been important. But we were a United States. We were a huge family and like other huge families we fought like cats and dogs with each other. But let someone else pick on my brother or sister that I've just beat the stuffing out of and that person will have unleashed all the fury of hell as I protect my sibling and take care of the aggressor.
We've done this as a nation as recently as September 11, 2001. During that horrific day and the weeks and months after it, this nation was one, united against an enemy that was trying to bully our brothers and sisters into a type of submission, we as Americans could not fathom. But we moved away from our united sense of family. As the decade moved forward, our national resolve was tested, not only as far as our foreign policy, but in relation to domestic issues as our economy fractured and our fingers began to wave at one another.
And now we stand as a nation divided. We've gone way past the sobriquets of democrat, republican, and independent. We've abandoned the simplified religious constructs of church goers and non-church goers. We no longer identify educational achievement by whether one completed grade school, high school, or college. These were broad stroke paintings of one another and were easily put aside after an election or when politicians sat down to work out a bill. If we defined ourselves in broad strokes, we could abandon them and work together.
Instead, we now define ourselves in terms of absolutes. Our beliefs are not broadly stroked but specifics that must remain within the lines. We look at conservatives, neo-conservatives, and paleo--conservatives or we look at ourselves as progressives, liberals, or social-liberals. The true independent has begun to disappear. The same happens with religion. We are evangelical {born-again Christians}, Orthodox Jews, or Papal obeying Catholics or we are considered to be a la carte religionists or non-religionists who are warring against religious liberty. It is worse yet if you are an atheist or a Muslim. To those who are conservative religionists, these people shouldn't hold rights in a modern America. Even our views of education have become polarizing. The difference is no longer whether you went to high school or college, it has morphed into a battlefield of whether one attended a college that teaches "American" or whether one attends one of those liberal elite colleges like Harvard or Yale or Stanford or Duke.
The problem here is that as a nation stakes out such divergent views, the ability for its' leaders to effectively govern becomes seriously impaired. We've seen this in election after election during the past half dozen years. Candidates aren't considered as favored or if the opposition wins, capable of governance. Now we hear that when a candidate wins in a state where the losing candidate was popular, the state begins to talk, not about following a legally elected leader, but instead, seceding from the union. We call elected officials falsely elected because we don't agree with them. We send our politicians messages that contrarianism is better than governance. That obstruction is better than real compromise.
So what do we get as a government? Politicians who do not speak to one another for fear that they might be looked upon by the voter as concilliatory. Power concentrated, not in the hands of those who are elected, but those who force signatures on promises or have the loudest mouth on radio or television. A congress that in difficult times, goes into the history books as the least productive congress in the history of the country.
This, people, is our fault! It feels good when we blame those in Washington D.C. or our statehouses for these problems that are plaguing our country. They are bums. They won't work together. Look at that congressional approval rating of 21%. We hate what is happening. But it's happening to them because it happened to you and I. We moved toward being ideologues and we've been demanding that our politicians be ideologues. So what do we get? Well, we get a republican party who, no matter what the circumstance will tell the country that the time is not right for a tax increase on anyone. That the problem isn't that the government doesn't have enough money, but that it spends too much. We get a democratic party that says that our major programs of social security, medicare, and medicaid are just fine and never need any fine tuning. Republicans say we need more money for defense and less for social programs. Democrats say we need more money for education and less for defense.
Who's right? If you voted for Mitt Romney, you probably think the republicans are right and the democrats are all wrong. If you voted for President Obama, you probably think the democratic party is right and the republicans are wrong. How many of us are willing to call our legislators and tell them that right and wrong meet somewhere in the middle? How many of us are willing to tell our elected officials that they don't represent just republicans or democrats, but every American, and must therefore find a way to make government work for all of us? How many of us are willing to walk hand in hand regardless of party and regardless of position on the conservative to liberal scale and tell our governors and legislators that they had best legislate for all of us, for if they don't whether they are democrats or republicans and whether we are democrats or republicans, we will find governors and legislators who will work for the common good.
I'm not naive. I am more liberal than most and would love to see a hyper-liberal country. I am also a realist, however, and know that I live in a country of 340,000,000 people that happens to be the greatest country on this planet. I am willing to give up a bit of my ideology to continue to move this country forward. Are you?
