America Was Built to Fail
And it has, repeatedly, only to be revolutionized and rebuilt. What kind of country will we create now?
Institutions, like individuals, never change because they realize they ought to; they only ever change because they’re forced to, by crisis, catastrophe. No one goes to their first AA meeting because they recognize that they have a drinking problem and it’s going to get out of hand unless they do something about it; they get fired, or their wife leaves them, or a judge orders them into rehab. Societies have even more inertia than people; individuals always recognize the need for reform long before their ostensible leaders do, which enables them to watch in well-informed horror as their nation slides inexorably toward disaster, like surgery patients paralyzed, but not rendered unconscious, by anesthetic.
Our country has been in denial for decades now, like a guy I once saw after a motorcycle accident, dragging one nearly severed leg behind him, punching an EMT who was trying to help, insisting he was fine. The only national problems I can think of that’ve gotten solved in my adult lifetime are the banning of CFCs and — as of this week — discrimination against homosexuals. (The ACA was an effort to address our unconscionable health care system, stunted in utero by the insurance and pharmaceutical industries.) Decades-long, trillion-dollar quagmires that killed hundreds of thousands of people for nothing didn’t dissuade us from foreign wars of occupation; the destruction of a major American city didn’t get us to take climate change seriously; the massacre of a school full of children didn’t move us to reform our gun laws. The grotesque shock of Donald Trump’s election has caused the DNC, after three years’ soul-searching, to nominate another centrist hawkish Wall Street–backed candidate exactly like the one who lost last time, evidently calculating that their only mistake was in running a woman. I’ve been waiting, with growing apprehension, for the disaster that would finally force our country to undertake some tragically…
