America's struggle to be reborn

I usually hate memes with a passion, but these made me laugh, especially in light of last week's riots and hitting the mile marker of 100,000 COVID-19 deaths overshadowed by country-wide protests that reflect the thin veneer of freedom being ripped off of racism in America, both in the same week as a somewhat celebratory American space launch. It feels like all hell is breaking loose in this giant country because we have reached a boiling point.

But this excerpt from one of recent commentators, Heather Cox Richardson really struck a chord, and gave me hope for the future. She is a professor of history with a specialty in 19th century US History at Boston College, and I HIGHLY recommend her daily digests as she looks at the day's news in the context of American history. (You can sign up for them here).

From her newsletter a few days ago:

“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”

America feels completely chaotic today. Protesters are marching in major cities, sometimes looting; police appear to be attacking them and the journalists covering the protests. Rather than calming the situation, the president has thrown gasoline on the fire, which escalated yesterday’s fight with Twitter. Trump launched a blistering verbal attack on China and announced that the United States is withdrawing from the World Health Organization in the midst of a deadly pandemic. Meanwhile, new information suggests that the Trump administration did, indeed, collude with Russia.

George Floyd is dead. So is Breonna Taylor. And so are more than 100,000 victims of a deadly pandemic.

The news is overwhelming. It is designed to be overwhelming.

This sort of chaos and confusion destabilizes society. In that confusion, as tempers run hot, people who are desperate for certainty return to old patterns and divide along traditional lines. Many are willing to accept a strong leader who promises to restore order, or simply are so distracted and discouraged they stop caring what their leaders do. They simply hunker down and try to survive. [...]

And over all this looms Covid-19, which has killed more than 104,000 of us already. Infections are climbing again.

I started out tonight by noting that this chaotic onslaught of news is designed to divide Americans and make us fall back into old animosities in order either to get us to accept a strong leader or to exhaust us until we quit caring what happens. In either case American democracy is over.

But there is another possibility. Chaos does not have to destroy us. The leaders creating it are doing so precisely because they know they are not in control, and the same uncertainty they are trying to leverage can just as easily be used by their opponents. At this crazy, frightening, chaotic moment, it is possible to reach across old lines and create new alliances, to reemphasize that most Americans really do share the same values of economic fairness and equality before the law, and to rebuild a “government of the people, by the people, and for the people.”

The old world is certainly dying, but the shape of the new world struggling to be born is not yet determined.





via {classical art memes}
other {sources unknown}