Americans peering down the telescope backwards?

 It is not only the “rugged individualism” that plagues the U.S.; it is also the bi-polar view the nation seems fixated on about the nature of the individual: some kind of hero, or some other kind of lout…..there is no room either for ambiguity or development…

Notice the preponderance of criminal charges, court cases, incarcerations, many of them for miniscule/innocuous/unharmful acts, and many of even those acts can be traced back to the underlying volcanic social and cultural insouciance that plagues the nation. Poverty, depression, early school drop out, unemployment, or employment in such demeaning jobs with minimal, literally starvation wages. And, to the outside world, it would appear that the primary streaming of many of the mostly male ‘undecided’s’ about what it is they would like to do with their lives, is focused on recruitment by and for the various arms of the military and/or the National Guard. Trumpeting those “scholarship recipients, especially the one’s accepted by the ‘first-rate’ universities, or the athletic achievements of a small number of late adolescents, while also coming the streets looking for, again, mostly men whose vehicles might be missing a tail-light, or a licence sticker, we see and hear an American culture that does not seem to tolerate ambiguity, certainly not the kind of ambiguity that accompanies millions of young people in their pursuit of whatever aspiration might have caught their attention.

It is not only through the tax code that Americans champion the top 1% of the culture in wealth and income. That 1%, in all fields, captures the attention, and the support and the guidance and the trophies, naturally creating the occasions for the philanthropists to make public presentations. So, it is not only in and through the political culture that the top 1% feeds on, nurtures and sustains and enhances itself.  The gild of the rose of individualism peels off quite quickly in the American towns and cities, if, for whatever cluster of reasons/causes/failures/omissions/commissions thousands of young people fall through the cracks of both the education and the social service systems. Given the rising tide of public adulation for the “private sector” and the accompanying tide of disdain for the “public sector” American schools have been Balkanized into classrooms of disrepair, and ivy-clad estates for the very rich. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, too, the meteoric rise of on-line educational software and the ‘pedagogy’ to support it, has cast another shadow over the need of the public education system to attract students in numbers that can and will warrant adequate funding. (Of course, the Republicans in the Senate will not be able to ‘see’ school enhancement, broadband universality, and social services as an integral part of an “infrastructure” program proposed by the White House. Defining everything that they must consider through the back end of a telescope, Republicans mistakenly think/believe(?) that they are maintaining tighter control over the matters of state, especially when compared with those “socialist” hordes in the Democratic Party, who see government as the solution for all social ills.

Individualism, then, as perceived, and then prescribed by the individual: for those seeking a smaller government, only those individuals who make a “contribution” to the party coffers, and the candidates who jump to the strings of their masters, those with fat wallets, investment portfolios, and ‘connections’ warrant serious consideration, when designing legislation, when designing political campaigns, when designing speeches, town-halls, and when paving the streets leading to electoral success for those who have already drunk the kool-aid.

Social services, including mental health services, of course, would, from the back end of a telescope appear to be another crutch to support those too weak to look after themselves. Social workers must deal only with those “less desireables” in the community, those who live ‘on the other side of the tracks from the ‘real, mostly white, mostly rich, and mostly highly educated, important people. Consequently, public funds to offer counsel, guidance, nutrition counsel, parenting courses, literacy programs, library-research coaching….all of those social elements that have been neglected by those very legislators who, for decades at least, have controlled state houses, governors’ mansions, and even the Congress, must take a back seat to those “profoundly needed” Pentagon and Homeland Security Budgets that “protect the nation from “foreigners”….

Ironically, the evidence is both clear and mounting that there are dangers from within, many of them individuals whose backgrounds were/are empty of the kind of “socializing” that many adoptive parents of puppies consider essential. Schools are designed and operated for far more legitimate reasons that exam grades, and the college admission test success, and then admission to the “school of your dreams”….Schools are an integral component of every community, where the kids of all the parents spend more time each day than they do with any other adult in their live, including their mother and father, or step-parent, or foster parent or grand parent. Anyone who thinks or believes that the only way to measure teacher effectiveness is to examine critically their students’ achievement results on standardized tests, has been living under a rock for at least half of their lives. The enthusiasm for learning, for asking questions, for digging in strange places for answers to strange questions, the kind of questions that come to the minds of students of all I.Q.’s, and not just to the top 1%, these are the ingredients that conceive of the learning “bug” and then gestate that learning “bug” into a full-blown, fully engaged, fully contributing, and fully rejoicing in their personal, their family and the community life.

Public schools, especially, are those places, incubators, green-houses of those “learning bugs” that fly about and land on those students’ hearts that have already been opened, like new Spring soil ready for seeding. And the process of that preparation, regardless of the agent, is essential for the “bug” to find a welcome brain-moss in which to develop. It is true both anecdotally, and demographically, that public schools draw kids from all social, economic, cultural, ethnic backgrounds, thereby “fertilizing” the garden in that green-house with elements glaringly excluded from the private school. And the national need to restore both public confidence and student and parent attraction to the public school system is one of the first and most necessary steps in any “build-back-better” funding legislation.

Ancillary in structure, but certainly not incidental in significance, are the kids’ need for supporting adults, not only volunteer athletic, dramatic, entrepreneurial, coaches. They need surrogate parents, (can you see those Republican Senators howling in derision?) in order to get a grasp of the breadth, the depth, the complexity, the range of opportunity, and the complexity of the world into which they are heading. Most parents have lived, attended their own school(s), colleges, universities, in far less complex times: not only was there no internet, no facebook, no twitter, no cyber-bullying, no menu of mind-altering substances, both legal and illicit, and no ambiguity about what jobs were going to be there after graduation. That stream alone, is so rapidly shifting that even those whose job it is to study and to counsel have trouble keeping up. Imagine the conundrum most parents face, and the vacuum of mature counsel that has to exist, given the social and cultural derision paid to such support services for those kids are still in school. Never mind the dearth of support services for those kids whose lives have shown signs of slipping away into the ether of the night, or the ethos of the gang, or the cinesphere of the fantasy life….prevention seems to be a concept considered anathema, certainly alien, to the American social culture.

The nation would, it appears to this outsider, (who has already brought down the wrath of insulted Americans being “lectured” by a measely Canadian!) prefer the highly heroic and highly sensationalized “crisis management interventions” when kids have overdosed, when other kids have suicided, when other kids have lost hope, when other kids have dropped out of school….and of course, the “costs” of rehabilitation when compared with the initial costs of prevention are, quite naturally and yet deniably, much higher. The problem with “prevention” however, is that, from a political point of view, it is not sexy; it does not garner the kind of headlines, dramatic television and movie scripts, the kind of budgetary arguments from blind and narrow-minded (remember that back end of the telescope) politicians who need public drama, and their purported efforts to rescue the ‘ship’ in order to cover themselves in public acclaim, or better yet, adulation.

Individuals, those seeking office, however, are not the reason for the political system. After all, they are only the temporary actors who sit in chairs long ago built and positioned in the belief that those coming after to sit in them will have their eyes, hearts, minds and spirits focused on the public good, including the obvious public needs.

Only the most narcissistic, opportunistic and deceptive candidates for political office would put their own needs and interests ahead of the glaring needs of their constituents, their towns and cities, their states, and their nation. The ‘servant’ model of leadership, far more than a memo, really a compendium of common sense, has seemed to have by-passed many of those currently occupying seats in state legislatures (where voting repression, restriction, especially of minorities is the current fixation) and in the Congress itself.

“Servant” is another model of “an individual” I hasten to remind those Americans who consider themselves leaders. And Leadership is a word that, historically has provided platinum examples of good servant stewardship from those in public office, visible to those younger generations aspiring to take their rightful place in those official chairs. The public good, obviously, is at the heart of the argument that public officials hold themselves accountable, focused on looking through the telescope on the bow of the ship of state, with a purpose to take in the clear picture of the evidence that is framed by the lens, to report that evidence, to digest the meaning of that evidence, and to take steps to insure that on their watch that ship does not run aground, does not get stuck in a canal of their own making, does not run out of the oil, gas, electricity and nuclear power that generates everything that moves on that ship.

Clearly, not only given the names and the pitiful legacies of the current crop of politicians in Washington, but also given both the size and the complexity of the issues that face those men and women, as well as the men and women in leadership around the world, (who just might be casting a doubting glance in the direction of the “beacon on the hill” of American Reaganesque history), neither the people of the U.S. nor the rest of us, in every other country on the planet, need, yes really do need, for the leadership of the United States to offer a menu of legitimate options on the environment, on digital and cyber security and control, on economic balance and equity, on pandemic preparedness and management, on worker protections and conditions of work with dignity and respect in all nations, as well as on empowering the international community with reformed agencies free of the emasculation indigenous to the United Nations and its Security Council.

While the United States is quick to decry what they consider the deplorable “human rights” conditions in many places around the world, it might be well advised to consider its own blatant negligence, not necessarily under some human rights code, but certainly under the rubric of common sense human relationships, through public schools, public services, public attitudes to those who continue to fall through the cracks in an increasingly combative and brutally competitive world. If the U.S. were to take a mere 1% of the budget allocated to the Pentagon and the bastion of the national security edifice and move it toward the provision of needed social and human and educational and health services, it might be amazed at the result in enhancement in “national security” considering the broadest and deepest meaning of those words.

Let’s speculate that the United States is, in a word, incapable of extending its national vision to the degree that its sacred goal of national security can be and will be enhanced and secured through paying attention to the legitimate needs of the least well-off Americans at home.

A beacon on a hill whose light has ‘run out of gas’