Now What?

Much is being made of the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States of America, most of it self indulgent, chest thumping, congratulatory puffery. But where did it all go so wrong? The United States I mean. And make no mistake, it has gone wrong, falling short of the potential it had to become a great beacon of achievement and benevolence. If it was an experiment, it is a failed one. So, now what?

I’m 76, a Baby Boomer, a generation confronted by change; relentless, difficult change. In the 60’s forces were unleashed that would change everything. Baby Boomers, now a majority and coming of age, found their voice and reached out for their power. It would unnerve our parents and rattle all the trusted conventions of the time. Even as I was living through it I could feel that everything I knew, all that I trusted was shifting beneath me. I just didn’t know how and I didn’t know my place in all of it.

If there had been any doubt, the events that would shake the decade were now officially underway. Just months before a US backed invasion of Cuba in 1961, at what would be known as the Bay of Pigs had ended in disaster, revealing for all the world to see the US in its true light; the United States was an interventionist foreign power willing in their ideological fight against communism to overthrow sovereign nations, a truth that has continued to this day.

I do remember being aware as the Cuban Missile Crisis unfolded each night on our black and white TV, that these two superpowers seemed prepared to engage in a terrible game of nuclear chicken, putting all that we had, all that the world knew into a nuclear jeopardy from which we might never recover. History has recorded that we came within minutes of such a holocaust.

And I now know as well, it is where my lifelong distrust of America was seeded.

One school day, in November 1963 we were sent home early. Girls were crying, teachers seemed to be in shock. John F. Kennedy, the US President had been assassinated, beginning a decade of horrifying and frightening events, the overall impact of which would change me profoundly. Just recounting the most significant events reminds me of just how tumultuous it all was. And if it was unnerving for me just imagine how unsettling it must have been for our parents, a generation which had just fought and survived a world war, hoping no doubt for a return to the order they had known before it all happened. But a return to order was not in the cards. A return to disorder it would be.

As that decade unfolded, each night on TV images from race riots, widespread arson, cities in flames, police brutality against anti Vietnam war protesters and civil rights protesters played out, police unleashing water cannons and dogs on protesting students, the National Guard killing young American citizens.  Walter Cronkite would begin the CBS Nightly News with a body count of young American boys who had died in Vietnam, sent over to fight communism. He would end that count at over 65,000 American dead by 1974, after the Vietcong had soundly defeated ‘the greatest military power in all of history’. The US left Vietnam, defeated and divided. And the worst was yet to come. 

I remember three of my classmates in my Grad Class of ‘67. Jim Wilkerson, John Middleton and Chance McKenzie, were all American boys who had been sent to private school in Canada. They had talked openly about the draft they were facing when they returned home but said they wanted to go to Vietnam. With the overstated bravado of young American boys they would announce to no one in particular that they wanted to go over there and show those Vietcong gooks just what US military power was all about. “Besides, if we don’t go, the Commies are going to take over the world.”. 

Within a few months of graduation, my three classmates were dead, shot dead in Vietnam. Once upon a time they had been teammates. Now they were dead. 

I have only laterally come to understand how much the war in Vietnam radicalized me. The indiscriminate and intentional bombing of helpless civilian populations, immolating helpless villagers with napalm, all part of trying to break the spirit of the Vietcong, the communist enemy; counting hundreds of thousands of dead and injured Vietnamese civilians as simply the cost of war.  President Nixon and the Secretary of State Henry Kissinger looking through the TV screen and lying! Denying to the American people that they were attacking Cambodia, at the very moment bombs were raining down. And for what!!? To fight communism we were told, a political force which would destroy all things “held sacred by the American people”. It was an evil fallacy, a hollow justification, as it remains today. The worst of it all, through the rest of my life I have witnessed as the US government has continued this imperial behaviour, keeping their civilian population on a war footing, serving a vile intoxicating gruel of nationalism, patriotism and militarism through each successive decade. Nothing has changed. Just the lies.

I would never again trust the US government. And that country has given me no reason to reconsider that distrust since; through each and every decade bullying the world with its raw power, threatening our security and arbitrating right and wrong without debate. That war revealed what America is at heart, and remains to this day. It is a country bitterly divided by racial hatred, and profound wide ranging inequality. Choose your poison: voting rights, civil rights, gender equality, income inequality, lack of basic affordable health care, a weaponized population, militarized police, citizens shot dead in the streets. Their crime? Protesting. Incredible wealth just down the street from abject poverty, standing militias sworn to overthrown their government and dysfunctional government, riven by unbending populist nativism and ideological division. 

America is at war, all the time. It has been since 1763, whether in plain view or more insidiously, secretly. It is now what it has always been, a ruthless arbiter of the American Way, unwaveringly violent in its never ending ambition to bring the world to its knees, unable to imagine or tolerate any other way than theirs. the Middle East just the most recent version of the same old thing – the US standing idly by as 73,000 Gazans were slaughtered by Israel, an entire population displaced.

It is easy to blame the current US president, Donald Trump, for all of this. He is an easy target. But to blame Trump is to miss the point, is to not see what you are staring at. We elect the leaders who best reflect how we think of ourselves, how we want to be seen. Trump is America. Trump has been elected twice and he is how Americans see themselves, how they want to be seen. He is a crude malevolent self serving bully, acting without conscience, mindful only of how his actions advance his goals. So is the United States.

So, now what?