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.
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