BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON | MAR 8
Almost every day you can view in HD the emaciated bodies of frightened, starving children crying for help, trapped inside the bombed out rubble of entire neighborhoods and cities all across Syria.
You can look into the angry and horrified faces of refugees along the closing border of Greece and Macedonia, tugging their children along, looking for human salvation, many of them the relatives of those whose bodies have floated up on the Mediterranean beach having not survived the desperate trip across the sea.
You are left aghast at the grotesque, genocidal inhumanity of man all across the Middle East and North Africa where terrorist extremists massacre innocent women and children, without a hint of remorse.
Here at home recessionary pressures enter their seventh year, with record numbers of people still looking for work good enough to feed their families and offer hope for the future of their children. There are 46 million Americans living in poverty and about that same number who suffer from food deficiencies.
You drive on dilapidated roads and learn that one of the greatest monuments to American freedom and vitality, the Memorial Bridge in Washington, DC is no longer safe and may have to be shut down, much like 60,000 other bridges across the country.
You read about the vulnerability of our electric grid and of cyber-security threats, contamination of water supplies that could reflect a national problem and an educational system that seems to be deteriorating faster than a kindergartner can throw down a nap rug. If you’re older you fret about Social Security and a health care system in which just one illness, Alzheimers, could well bankrupt Medicare if it is not stopped.
And then you get this:
“I don’t have anywhere else to turn — so I’m turning to you. I need to ask you for a personal favor — even though it may come at great personal expense…I need your help now more than ever.”
A wrenching note from a sick relative? A desperate friend facing financial ruin?
No. It’s a fundraising appeal from Ted Cruz, looking for more cash for what may well be a hundred-million-dollar campaign, among campaigns that will consume billions in national resources.
Meanwhile Marco Rubio and Donald Trump are exchanging glances over the size of the Donald’s maleness, raising that question most men don’t want answered: How big is big enough?
Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders are finding new ways to foment and then exploit racial and class divisions for their own political interests, a behavior as bad as anything done or said by Donald Trump, but obviously reported and interpreted much differently. Progressives play class and race cards, so often, so fast and so furiously, it must drive Trump up his gilded walls.
It’s not just politics.
American college campuses seem to be in constant turmoil and in seemingly intellectual decline. Some sensitive youngsters don’t have a “safe place” to drink their mocha latte without the overbearing presence of someone of a different race, gender, ethnicity or astrological sign.
On another campus impeachment proceedings are being brought against student leaders who did not condemn the wearing of small sombreros at a tequila party, hosted by a student from Colombia, South America. Elsewhere there are college students roaming university campuses who can’t tell you who the Revolutionary War was fought against, or who won the Civil War or what side Lincoln was on. But they can offer up details on the life of Snookie.
On yet other campuses, distinguished leaders such as former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Christine LaGarde, head of the International Monetary Fund, have been prevented from fulfilling speaking engagements because of ideological intolerance.
My journalist spouse and editor is always admonishing me to get to the point. So, here it is finally (can’t teach a very old dog even old tricks):
We live in an America coming apart at the seams. It is not just our political fabric being torn asunder, but the social, cultural, economic, and even religious fabric of our lives as well. And, we’re doing nothing about it. We just keep on tearing.
We are responding to the wrong priorities, growing incredibly intolerant and exceedingly stubborn and defensive in our beliefs. We are engaging in childish behavior whether in political debate or driving to work. We can’t discuss. We can only argue because we know it all, from watching Fox and MSNBC and CNN.
We are paying attention to the wrong stimuli, not giving each other the benefit of the doubt and abandoning the very institutions of life, society, and government that have made this one of the greatest countries on earth for two centuries, Canada and Bhutan excluded. Not only is our distrust of government at 19 percent, so is our trust in our fellow votes to do the right thing. Truth is all relative.
It’s been going on for a long time; in politics most stridently since the late 1980s, in life, pick a year. Decline in church attendance? Advent of the Internet? Recession? We all have our benchmarks to suit our own predispositions.
It is all of us; from liberal and conservative politicians and pundits to anonymous cowards on social media, from liberal college professors to philandering right-wing talk show hosts, from salespeople to accountants, lawyers and physicians who could care less about politics and think it beneath them.
We all do it.
We succumb to this phony division of society between victims and villains, elitists and average joes, establishment and anti-establishment, black and white, man and woman, rich and poor, gay and straight, urban and rural. It is especially pervasive in politics, anarchist and libertarian, libertarian and conservative, neo conservative and traditional, conservative and moderate, moderate and liberal, liberal and progressive, progressive and socialist, socialist and communist, communist and anarchist. And the circle closes. The media magnify them and amplify them and make them more divisive than ever, because it is good theater and good theater is good business. Forget the First Amendment.
We should all do some serious soul-searching, but we have to quit searching everybody’s soul but our own. Ours is not a condition created from the top down. We may be suffering from mediocre to miserable leadership, but leadership is not the problem or the cure. Ours is a condition created from the inside out, a condition of the heart and mind, ours, not theirs.; not them, but us; not they, but we.
Americans keep asking who’s in charge?
Look in the mirror.
Editor’s Note: Mike Johnson is a former journalist, who worked on the Ford White House staff and served as press secretary and chief of staff to House Republican Leader Bob Michel, prior to entering the private sector. He is co-author of a book, Surviving Congress, a guide for congressional staff. He is currently a principal with the OB-C Group.