Clutching our pearls over America

Dear Friends,

Can it be a week already? A week since we celebrated the moment, 250 years after our country’s founding.

Since then, head-spinning revelations debunked a promising candidate for Senate, on again/off again bombs burst in the air over a foreign land, and the President picked fights with our strongest allies, played whack-a-mole with presidential aircraft, and bullied FIFA.

Whew, it’s been a week.

My takeaway from the holiday and ensuing events: there is an urgent need for a reset, if not a rescue plan for the country. The cavalry isn’t coming; only we will be the rescuers.

But this ain’t our first rodeo. It’s not the first time the populace cried - “the country’s going to hell!”

We Boomers were immunized against crises in our young adulthood by the triple assassinations of leadership in the 1960s (JFK/MLK/RFK), followed by civil strife that burned major cities, Vietnam War escalation, and youthful, sometimes violent, protests.

The unprecedented events of Watergate (the only political scandal to create a permanent suffix, I’m told) and, of course, Nixon’s resignation. Some wild times.

The country’s protocol held and the rhythm of government stayed the course, even though economic crises, distant wars, domestic terrorism, and a worldwide pandemic upended our way of life over the decades since.

One difference now is that instantaneous communication spreads news everywhere and all at once.

It took years for the news of the Emancipation Proclamation to reach Texas1, ultimately resulting in a national holiday.

Today it takes nanoseconds for shapeshifting news to reach the remotest corner, 24/7.

Maybe we’re a little browbeaten by the relentlessness of the cascading crisis - is this something younger generations manage better? Is their bandwidth for chaos wider and stronger than ours?

Two things trouble me:

• The particular brew of incompetent nationally elected leadership and global disdain shivering down the timbers of the ship of state.

• The sense of resignation I’ve heard among some Boomer friends.

  “I’m too old to care”; “I’ll be dead by the time the crash/dissolution/socialism/communisim/somethingism is at the doorstep.”

Saying “it’s not the country I knew” is both accurate and defeatist. It’s likely not the country you thought you knew, or grew up in, even with all its longstanding warts.

One of the more level-headed Boomer pundits, Robert Reich2, took up the challenge of national repair and restoration in a Substack article posted on July 5th. He presented ten straightforward ideas that could unravel, or at least mitigate, much of what got us where we are.

He wrote:

I’m focusing on basic meat-and-potatoes reforms of how our government functions — reforms that will be necessary to get anything done.

His ideas might cause those advantaged by recent changes in our governance to clutch their pearls.

But then there is a lot of pearl clutching going on these days. Many are genuinely worried that we are near or at a turning point toward irrevocable change from which there is little chance of returning.

I’m hopeful (wishful?) that at least some of Reich’s interventions pave the way to navigate this crisis, as we have done before over the last 250 years.

Let’s keep seeking “a more perfect union,” knowing it is far from, and never will be, perfect.

Such is the nature of representative democracy.

Thanks for reading/listening. See you next Saturday!

xo

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