Notes on America #5
Americans are incredible. Nobody produces and consumes faith like we do. We believe in sports teams, brands, religions, political parties, and each other. We wear shirts adorned with our employer’s logos on weekends. Faith has carried us through numerous recessions, at least one great depression, and a steady amount of oppression, but right now feels different.
Right now we’re having a remarkably calm discussion about how lightly armed terrorists occupied our Capitol, while the transition of power in the oldest continuous democracy is being threatened, during a pandemic claiming thousands of lives a day.
All of this compounded by countless other personal micro-tragedies occurring at any given moment. Mass PTSD feels hyperbolic, but when I step back for a moment I don’t know how else to describe our collective emotional state. I think it would be fair to say our faith is being tested.
Yet somehow a large amount of Americans get up every day put on sweatpants or headphones or scrubs with precious little, or already lost, job security and start acting like this is somehow a thing we can move on from. We can’t just ignore this. It’s not going away.
We want to believe in things together. The sensation of belonging is addicting and there’s never been an easier time to go from finding a few hundred people, to finding a few million people that agree with you.
We’ve become a nation of rivals. We pick a team, we stick with that team, because the only thing worse than losing is being alone; and somewhere between Watergate and Pizzagate we threw out the playbook. Many of us started to realign our faith. Belief in a myth of a magical time when America was greater, has led to living in an America that is clearly worse. We’re waking up from an American dream deferred and are tossing in the dark, listening up for a new story to rock us back to sleep.
America at its core is nothing more than a story, it’s our collective belief that gives it power. As I sit with my son this morning, with the news on in the background, I wonder what country will he inherit? What world will he grow up in? What stories will he tell, and maybe more importantly what stories will be told to him. I can’t help but hope that after a few years of constantly hitting new bottoms, we might have finally found the floor. It’s time for us to start writing our story again.
