A lot of folks are thinking about leaving America for better places. This season, many Americans are dissatisfied with our response to the pandemic, the state of our society and culture. America in general.
I’m staying. Here’s why.
America is special to me, but not because we don’t make mistakes. We have made many mistakes, poor decisions, and we never quite agree on anything. Yet we are the wealthiest nation on earth because we also continuously correct ourselves and discover solutions to our problems.
We are no longer a new nation. America has been a constitutional democracy for centuries. We hear that American democracy is under attack today, but democracy is always under attack from all sides: right, left, and center.
Always. If you think not, you haven’t paid attention. Take heart, you’re not alone. Even historians have a bit of rose tint in their glasses. In this country, standard histories tend to gloss over attacks on democracy. If you disbelieve, go to the newspaper archives and see for yourself what folks were thinking about Hitler in the late 1930s. The 3rd Reich had its American backers. And it’s not only American democracy under attack. One way of reading Thucydides, the Greek historian of the 5th century BCE, is as an analysis of attacks on Athenian democracy.
The losing side in every American election, from high school class president to U.S. president, claims the election was defective. Republicans thought so in 2020, Democrats in 2016, and on down the line. No one likes to lose, so we come up with reasons, any reason we can latch onto: voter fraud, door-belling the wrong neighborhood, the electoral college, gerrymandering, hanging chads, lying politicians, external conditions like the weather, pandemics, or foreign wars. Some excuses have some truth, others not.
More than anything else, they’re excuses.
When I was a software developer, I always tried to build self-correcting systems that made seriously bad choices and errors so obvious, so blatant, they were immediately corrected.
American democracy is a self-correcting system. That’s the secret to our success. Over and over, things go sideways, millions of eyes focus on the issue, and we work it out in the fervid and contradictory jumble of thought and effort that is our society. Americans disagree with each other, but our freedom to investigate and think for ourselves coupled with our election process always favors effective solutions.
Solutions in a free society are not cheap or easy. Among a free people, you are free to say that things are bad, say something nasty, say what people want to hear. No matter how false or outrageous your statements, you’ll get attention and some people will believe you. There’s money to be made. Unscrupulous folks take advantage of this and always have, but in America, people decide for themselves and solutions that work eventually appear. The attention-getting phantasms fade away, but until they fade, they are often viciously destructive.
This is not the first tough time for the U.S. A civil war, two world wars, the Great Depression of the 1930s, the forgotten economic crises of the 19th century were all tough. The 1918 flu pandemic was a killer. Many of us once believed owning other humans was morally right. These tough times were addressed with new ideas and solutions that rose to the top from the chaos of a free people.
America’s 2021 is not easy. Nearly 800,000 dead in less than 2 years— more than the population of Seattle or Denver, more than the U.S. combat deaths in all the wars in the 20th and 21st centuries. Cherishing our freedom, many more of us have died than in autocratic states with more draconian mandates.
The pandemic has generated difficult economic issues, which, like covid-19, no one has seen before or anticipated.
Who thought a disease that kills mostly the old and sick would lead to a truck driver shortage? Labor shortages may have been predictable, but who predicted the Great Resignation?
We haven’t found the American solution to the pandemic yet. Mandatory lock-downs, masks, and vaccinations have worked in China. Their pandemic death rate is minuscule and their economy is nearly fully recovered. But the solution is not to double down on methods that clearly have not worked here. Instead, we have to find the American solution.
Now, the world faces the Omicron variant. No one knows if it will fizzle away or rage like the Delta variant, but all the experts say that variants will continue to appear and every variant has the potential to evade the vaccines and kill more.
More medicines, faster easier testing, ideas no one has noticed yet, all may be part of our solution.
We will find the American solution. It will not be autocracy or abandoning our freedom. If any entity can tackle this challenge, it’s the United States of America.