What’s our problem?
We’re angry and anxious yet life is good
The special conceit of the oped column is that the writer has some unique insight to share with the readers. As my friends and family would no doubt aver, this is an easy role for me to assume. I am not one to blanch from sharing my views!
But today I want to break from tradition and posit a question, one to which I honestly do not have an answer: Why are we Americans so unhappy with the state of our union?
According to the RealClearPolitics polling average, just 33 percent of Americans think that we are on the “right track,” while 58 percent think we are on the “wrong track.”
Another sobering statistic, this one from the Pew Research Center, which asked respondents in many nations whether life was better or worse now than it was 50 years ago. Just 37 percent of Americans said life was better now, while 41 percent said it was worse. For lack of a better word, these results are nuts. Fifty years ago, in 1967, some 11,000 American soldiers were killed in action in Vietnam. On the home front, urban unrest in Detroit and Newark led to violence and destruction of property.
There have been so many improvements in quality of living since then. Life expectancy is up. Child mortality is down. Poverty, of course, remains with us — but poverty today is much less difficult than in years gone by. The economy right now is as strong as it has been since the 1990s. Crime was a major social problem as recently as the 1990s, but it is not nearly as acute today. And with a few worrying exceptions, our soldiers overseas are not in harm’s way.
No doubt, we have problems. Income inequality remains persistent, in no small part because the wealthy have gained enormous windfalls over the past 30 years while the incomes of average Americans have improved only a little. The opioid epidemic is a major public-health problem that, unfortunately, the federal government does not seem interested in prioritizing. The wild and reckless regime in North Korea seems intent on provoking the United States. And so on.
But here’s the thing: We always have problems. If you could time travel back to any point in American history and ask people what they were worried about, they would answer with some long litany. Human beings are flawed, selfish creatures, and the effort to provide for the common good of all always has been, and will always be, an existential struggle.
What seems to be different now is our lack of perspective, our inability to place ourselves in the grand march of human history and recognize that we have it better than any of our ancestors. Indeed, if we take the Pew poll seriously, we seem convinced that we have it worse.
I’ll admit that I, too, feel this pull toward anxiety all the time. I have to remind myself that this actually is a great time to be alive. So why so much angst? I do not know.
I have theories. It could be the nature of modern news, with its 24/7 focus on crises, calamities and crime. It could be political polarization, which reframes even relatively anodyne issues (e.g., what is the proper level of corporate taxation?) as existential battles between the forces of good and evil. It could be the diversification of the body politic — we tell ourselves that diversity is good, and it is, but historically speaking, humans have an innate tendency to look askance at people who are different. Paradoxically, it actually could be the accelerating rate of technological and material progress, which makes it feel as though the world is moving too fast for us to keep up. Or it could be some or all of the above.
But, it could be something else entirely. Maybe in another 50 years, historians will have figured out what was wrong with us. For now, it remains a mystery. At least to me.