Looking for an American do-over in ’21
One thing we can probably all agree upon at the beginning of this new year: We need a fresh start. There’s the pandemic, which has torn friends and loved ones from our neighborhoods and families. There’s economic hardship for millions, racial inequity and strife, political acrimony, rising urban violence, a resurgent toll from drug abuse. We’ve seen devastating storms and wildfires. In all, 2020 has been a terrible year. As we start another circuit of the sun, we must dare to imagine better.
A lot of the worst of 2020 was our own fault: We haven’t overcome the nation’s original sin of slavery, nor confronted climate change, nor turned away from approaching politics as a circus of half-imagined grievances.
Luckily for us, though, America is a land of new beginnings and do-overs. It’s part of our heritage.
Take John Paul Jones, for example, who is revered as the father of the United States Navy. He was a hot-tempered Scottish sailor named John Paul; he added “Jones” to his identity when he fled to the American colonies after running a crew member through with a sword (considered poor leadership even by Royal Navy standards). His cooler command under American banners in British waters won “Jones” international renown and, later, an admiralty in the Imperial Russian Navy.
Or consider the early Quakers, a tiny sect of oddballs that was severely persecuted in England. After establishing an American colony to flee the oppression, they emerged as thoughtful leaders and ran the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania for decades, strongly influencing the abolition and women’s rights movements.
We like to lavishly reward people who start over. Abraham Lincoln’s persistent failures — in politics, business and personal affairs — are legendary, often cited as unintended inspiration from the man many revere as our greatest president.
Yes, it is a quintessential American impulse to relaunch. So let’s see if we can do the rest of the 21st century better than we’ve done the decades of the aughts and the teens. Although, truth be told, we already tried to right the ship once before in this century, after the disastrous invasion of Iraq, with its side effects (Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, the empowerment of Iran and more), and amid the never-ending war in Afghanistan and the Great Recession — all of which upended our confidence, rattled our allies and undermined the notion of America as the undisputed world leader we had imagined ourselves to be after the Cold War.
Now, notes Jarrett Blanc, a former diplomat affiliated with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, “we need to prepare ourselves for a global demotion” that can only in part be blamed on Donald Trump’s arrogant go-it-alone foreign policy. In fact, Blanc notes in a recent report, a more accommodating and realistic America, freed of the burden of world leadership, may be better able to meet the needs of its citizens here at home.
Except for the most ardent Trump cultists, Americans from all political quarters surely will be relieved if the chaos of the past four years in Washington is replaced by a more civil, compassionate approach to government. That won’t happen unless we turn away from those who foresee the satisfaction of their ambitions in aping the snarling turmoil of the present. Let’s be done with all that.
How do we recover? Maybe there are clues if we imagine the nation as an individual hoping to recover from a string of personal catastrophes — failed relationships, financial ruin, professional disappointment and the like. Social scientists and self-help experts might say that a first step is to realistically confront those failures, a stage that bestselling author Brené Brown calls “the reckoning.”
Then, Brown writes, comes “the rumble,” a tough fight with ourselves, a step necessary to rise from life’s inevitable troubles. Here’s her prescription:
“Get honest about the stories we’re making up about our struggle, then challenge these confabulations and assumptions to determine what’s truth, what’s self-protection, and what needs to change if we want to lead more wholehearted lives.”
If a clear-eyed assessment of that sort is fundamental to an individual trying to get up off the canvas after a knockdown, then it’s probably what a nation must do, too.
Such an inventory of what’s real and what’s not is hard these days, of course, since we can’t seem to agree on facts, thanks in no small part to the cynical manipulations of partisans and their media enablers. But America’s integrity is on the line.
We need to rise beyond a president who is still trying to subvert our democracy by getting Congress to throw out election results that, according to 90 state and federal judges’ rulings, were not, in fact, fraudulent. We have to step over the desiccating hulk of the Trump presidency and find firmer footing beyond. There is solid ground for both left and right ahead.
The foundation of that renewal, though, must be truth-telling. As the abolitionist Frederick Douglass noted, “The life of the nation is secure only while the nation is honest, truthful and virtuous.” In that, there’s hope.
There may be clues for America’s renewal in how an individual recovers from catastrophe.