San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
A Fourth reminder: We’ve been here before
The United States approaches its birthday in a collective funk.
As the country prepares for the Fourth of July holiday, pessimism and rancor are rising while faith in core institutions is fading.
A national poll indicates that over the past decade, confidence in the Supreme Court has dropped from 50 percent to 22 percent; for Congress, 42 percent down to 9 percent; for the executive branch, 41 percent to 11 percent.
Two out of three Americans believe their voices no longer count, and 61 percent express dissatisfaction with their lives.
The New York Times offers this diagnosis of our national malady:
“For many Americans, it is the age of anomie, when events, technology communications and social movement have combined to confuse the national sense of purpose and values.”
That’s what life was like in the United States in July 1976, as a conflicted country celebrated its bicentennial.
On the one hand, Americans were swept up in the marketing blitz for the country’s 200th birthday. For two years leading up to the big day, you could watch “Bicentennial Minutes” every night on CBS, delivered by celebrities such as Vincent Price and Jessica Tandy.
In 1976, companies peddled everything from Liberty Bell socks to red, white and blue ice cream.
In San Antonio, North Central Ford offered a $200 cash rebate for any car purchase on the week of Independence Day. Hy Grade Meat Co. invited locals to celebrate America’s bicentennial “the ole fashioned way with a delicious box of steaks from the Steak-O-Matic System.”
All the orchestrated festivities and business tie-ins, however, couldn’t heal the nation’s battered psyche.
We were coming off a long, disastrous war in Vietnam and the sleaze, corruption and abuse of power that fell under the umbrella of Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal. We had clashes over race, ethnicity, morals, gender roles and sexual orientation.
We were locked in the Cold War with the Soviet Union, dealing with an energy crisis, battling runaway inflation and worrying about pollution.
Conservative syndicated columnist James Kilpatrick said Americans were desperately looking for a “cessation in the shrill and bitter tumult.”
Where we didn’t see division, we surely saw dysfunction.
At the risk of turning this column into a verse from Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the
Fire,” my basic point, for anyone overcome with frustration, anxiety and anger right now, is that we’ve been here before.
There is no doubt that this 246-year-old national experiment of ours is looking pretty tattered right now.
We can’t agree on fundamental realities, like Joe Biden defeating Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election or a pro-Trump mob of conspiracy mongers leading an insurrection (not a tourist visit, as some Trump acolytes insist) at the nation’s Capitol.
We see little children getting murdered in their own classrooms and politicians doing little to address it.
We’ve got acrimony over the U.S. Supreme Court repealing the federal right to an abortion. We’ve got fights over voting access. We’ve got Republican leaders trying to block teachers from discussing this country’s history of racism and school libraries from including books that acknowledge same-sex attraction.
We’ve got social media fanning the discord and providing each of us with our own comfortable silos of confirmation bias.
But it’s important to remember that we have been here before.
Not exactly in this way. Certainly not with this technological ecosystem. But we’ve been divided and we’ve been down.
The way out of here is a long road — with some maddening detours and no guarantees that we’ll reach our preferred destination.
It requires a commitment to communicate with each other, to seek information from reliable sources, to pull back from social media and to let some oxygen into the room. It means putting a little more effort into persuading people and a little less effort into vanquishing them.
It means dogged political activism. It also means that we stop rewarding mindless pandering and demand the best from the people who represent our major parties.
I recently had the displeasure of watching Wednesday night’s Arizona Republican gubernatorial debate and I was astounded at the parade of ignoramuses on display.
There are smart people in this country across the ideological spectrum, but in too many cases we’re elevating buffoons to political office, because they shout the loudest and don’t burden our brains with nuance.
Let’s use this Fourth of July to reboot and re-calibrate and rekindle our belief in the possibility of change. Ultimately, it’s all we’ve got.