When did I first start to realize that America wasn't perfect? I knew that there had been slavery from a very young age and that a great man, Abraham Lincoln had put a stop to it. I also knew that in my lifetime black people weren't being treated well and were fighting for their civil rights. I remember the nightly news covering the Vietnam War and all of the demonstrations against it. I watched Watergate - reality tv for my generation. I knew that the ERA (Equal Rights Amendment) was really important but that states weren't ratifying this amendment to the Constitution. On the one hand I lived in a country that was awesome and on the other hand we had all these things that we needed to address.
I love my country. I always have and I always will. I don't love my government. These days I think a lot of folks have mistaken love of country with love of party which equates to a love for their form of government. In addition, the reality on the ground does not match the perceptions that people have about our country.
Last November the country voted for America First without really understanding that it's always been America first, until now. Everything we've ever done has been to promote the interests of the United States. Whether its the amount of money we spend on foreign aid, the wars we fight or the immigrants we welcome in to our country, it's always about putting ourselves and our interests ahead of everyone else. If we compromise, it's to further our interests.
The administration we have now though is reacting to perceptions that have long been held and don't again, match with the facts. Getting people to actually understand these facts and to believe them is going to be a heavy lift. We have establishment news organizations who get stories wrong regularly and who also pay pundits who have a definite agenda to come on their shows and espouse their views without telling us about these hidden agendas. Our new reality is that we have a President who believes in the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones puts forwards and so do many of his supporters.
We believe so many things that aren't true such as Americans have the best healthcare in the world. We don't. We pay twice as much as other developed nations and we're not as healthy and we don't live as long. We think immigrants are stealing our jobs and depressing our wages. They're not. In fact immigration is a boost to the economy that not only benefits the immigrant but those of us living here already. We want to give up on public education and even pursuing a college degree as if those things haven't been critical to advancing America's agenda. How can you be first if everyone is a ditch digger? I mean no disrespect to ditch diggers, they work very hard for their money, but if that's the only job everyone qualifies for then we don't make medical, scientific and technological advances. We'd never have put a man on the moon or stopped the spread of disease.
We've abdicated our leadership in the world and we're allowing China to step in to fill the void. This will make negotiating in our best interests much more challenging. We're now staring down the massive impacts from climate change that include not only land loss but famine and disease. Do we want to let others solve these problems for us while we look on from the outside?
When I was younger I thought Americans could do anything. We were smart, we were savvy, we were problem solvers and innovators. Nowadays, I'm not so sure we still have that in us. If we stay on our current path of "America First" we will wake up one day to find that we are last.
