A SICK SOCIETY ON LIFE SUPPORT

Regardless of the outcome of the 2020 election, and that Donald Trump will likely get in the neighborhood of 60 million votes even if he loses, we must confront the fact that we Americans are living in an increasingly sick society that threatens not just the fabric but the very existence of our nation. That nearly 63 million people voted for Trump in the 2016 election was alarming, a disturbing sign of just how sick our society has become over the last 40 years dating back to the administration of Ronald Reagan.
Now it’s understood citizens will never agree 100% on anything. It makes perfect sense that the only ideal political party is a party of one. There are people out there who insist the earth is flat, and you can probably even find some who will dispute the fact the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. There will always be extremists at both ends of the political spectrum.
But, for the benefit of a healthy society, public opinion should gravitate toward the middle. The middle should not be rigid; it should be flexible and move slightly left or slightly right according to the public’s political appetites at the time and where its differences can be settled through compromise as they were for most of the the first 200 years of our history. Never in a healthy society should the public be as polarized as it currently is, and that abyss will almost certainly widen in November. Although it may not happen in what remains of my lifetime, I can easily foresee an armed revolution, another civil war, on the horizon. For the first time in my eight decades on this planet, I’ve seriously considered owning a gun for my personal protection.
I trace our ills back to Vietnam. That’s when many Americans lost respect for authority, respect for law enforcement, and respect for those wielding political power. President Jimmy Carter recognized that and foresaw a troubled future for our country in his famous 1979 “Crisis of Confidence” speech but was powerless to change the direction.
“Looking for a way out of this crisis,” Carter spoke, “our people have turned to the Federal Government and found it isolated from the mainstream of our nation’s life. The gap between our citizens and our government has never been so wide. What you see too often in Washington … is a system of government that seems incapable of action. You see a Congress twisted and pulled in every direction by hundreds of well-financed and powerful special interests.”
“We are at a turning point in our history,” Carter emphasized. “There are two paths to choose. One is a path … that leads to fragmentation and self-interest. Down that road lies a mistaken idea of freedom, the right to grasp for ourselves some advantage over others. That path would be one of constant conflict between narrow interests ending in chaos and immobility. It is a certain route to failure.”
History did not turn. Eighteen months later Reagan was President, and over the next 40 years things have gotten worse for all but the privileged few. Reagan talked about “trickle down” economics, that what benefited the wealthy would benefit us all. It was voodoo economics. Water trickles down; money floods up.
During his two terms in office, Reagan cut the tax rate on the wealthiest citizens from 70% to 28%, then began taxing workers’ Social Security benefits to help make up the difference in the budget deficit. Thirty years later the Republicans were still up to the same old tricks while running up the national debt to historic proportions and all the while falsely claiming they were the party of fiscal responsibility while Democrats were wastrels. Trump’s tax cut again made the rich richer while the vast majority of American workers had to settle for a few extra dollars in their paychecks.
“Let me tell you a little secret,” billionaire Michael Bloomberg said. “Donald Trump’s economic plan was to give a huge tax cut to guys like me who didn’t need it and then lie about it to everyone else.”
In the mid-‘60s a corporate CEO made approximately 20 times the salary of the average worker in his company. In 2019 the CEOs of America’s 350 largest corporations made a staggering 320 times that salary. Forty percent of the nation’s wealth is concentrated in the hands of one percent of the population. Twenty-five percent of American families have less than $10,000 in wealth, and the annual earnings of one worker in three fall below the government’s definition of the poverty level. While 27 million Americans are currently unemployed during the worst recession since the Great Depression, the stock market continues to churn out record profits for the wealthy because only about 10% of Americans are even invested in securities. Among the G7 industrial nations, the U.S. has the worst income inequality gap.
Yet somewhere around 60 million citizens will repeatedly and illogically vote against their own self-interests and the interests of the public as a whole. They will continue to blindly and wholeheartedly support the Republican Party and Donald Trump, a narcissist and chronic liar who has done absolutely nothing for them – and is on the record thinking nothing of them – while exploiting their irrational behavior to further polarize the populace and sow dissension and chaos. The cancer eating away at our nation is spreading and metastasizing at an alarming pace, making the upcoming election perhaps the most important one in our history. It defies reason to explain how the United States of America became so sick so quickly and why millions of citizens, like the anti-vaccination crusaders, are blind to a cure.
Perhaps the late Carl Sagan, one of the most brilliant minds of our time, summed it up best. Sixteen years after Jimmy Carter peered into the future and was disturbed by what he saw, Sagan was no less distressed in a book he co-authored, “The Demon-Haunted World.”
“I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time,” Sagan wrote, “when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the power to set their own agendas or knowledgably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness. The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30-second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentation on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.”
Unless Jimmy Carter’s turning point is reached in November, Carl Sagan’s last sentence may become the nation’s epitaph.