I was away doing the endless annual maintenance that a decades old log cabin in the wilderness demands. I missed the recent Presidential debate. I hadn’t been back in town an hour when the radio in my truck informed me that the debate had been combative and revealing. The next day, I took the time to view it and came away saddened. It wasn’t the bravado of one candidate or the frailness of the other. The messages from each seemed to originate in different universes.
The political divide in the USA appears almost as great as it was in the mid 1800s which led to The Civil War. But today we are not battling over something as obscene or pervasive as slavery. There have always been areas in our society and culture that divide us. In most cases they revolve around some perceiving inequity or injustice where others see problems that have been with us a long time but are improving.
Those who see improvement believe that the economy and society are the engines of that improvement. Those who only see problems believe that the economy and society are the causes of the problems. In a world of smartphones, and laptops, many have come to expect instant gratification. I come down on the side of progress.
The inequity and injustice today are crumbs compared to just a few decades ago. No person in America is owned by others. The grinding poverty of the 1930s and 40s has been replaced by arguments over the inequity of the quality of housing and the diet of people. That isn’t to say that there aren’t problems, there are. But today, many of society’s crises are driven by a collapse in personal responsibility and a belief that somehow the government must fix everything. A democracy is poorly designed to fix major societal ills. Unlike autocratic government models, a democracy cannot dictate and then enforce solutions. What it can do is provide data and exposure.
My recommendation is that we re-embrace the values that launched this nation. That we recognize that success is progress, and that perfection is a moving target. It might also serve us to accept that we have different views and that is a good thing. As the son of a struggling single mom, I can and have embraced the push for more equity in pay between men and women. But to some today, embracing more traditional women’s values, women whose focus is directed at home and family is not a bad thing. Making scholarships available to those in need is a good thing. The US has been working to overcome the use of race as a factor for employment or educational opportunities for more than a century. It is a lot better today. It will be better tomorrow if we don’t succumb to the mistaken belief that the economy and society are the cause. They offer us the tools to continue progress.
In my new book, Tempest North, the story takes the reader through early 1800’s Spanish, Russian, Native American, North American, and revolutionary cultures and economies. Perhaps you will marvel as I do, that as we mixed all that together, we survived at all. It worked because the earlier struggles just to provide food, clothing and shelter were largely common and we learned to work together. Most of our divide today is a function of becoming a wealthy society. Let’s embrace that. Wealth forces us to discuss the difference between equity and equality. We are a society based on equity.