A State Of The Union Address Ahead Of The 2024 Election
My fellow Americans, we are living in dark times. As many of you likely sense, we are deeply divided and our nation is shrouded with frustration, uncertainty, animosity, and resentment.
In the summer of 1797, the founders of our nation crafted a preamble to our constitution that held the establishment of justice, domestic tranquility, provisions for the common defense, and the promotion of the general welfare as essential components in building a democratic nation. However, we as a nation have seemed to lose sight of these.
We are ruled by those who do not seek justice, domestic tranquility, or our well-being. While our rulers promote the welfare of some Americans, this benevolence coincides with these Americans’ capacity to fund their political campaigns for the purposes of attaining and sustaining political power.
For those of us unable to leverage such financial resources, we are ignored, disregarded, and ultimately discarded. The promotion of the general welfare has now morphed into a promotion of the welfare of a few, representing more of an oligarchy than the representative democracy our founders sought to establish.
At the same time, instead of promoting social cohesion and domestic tranquility, our politicians and the media they use to propagandize on their behalf, seek to divide us. We are caricatured and reduced to our political beliefs. The construction of these caricatures results in fostering a simple and illusory depiction of what it means to be a person. Within these caricatures, we lose sight of how nuanced we can be. We forget how much we have in common and how similar we actually are.
This is the goal of our rulers. As we are siloed into simple political categorizations, the complexity of human thought and life is diminished. These categorizations are then used to foster resentment among us and create an efficient way to identify the enemy. For as we know, it is easier to castigate someone as this or that when you reject from the start their own capacity to challenge your misperceptions of them.
Our nation is also sicklier than ever. Obesity plagues our adults and children drastically increasing their chances to obtain diseases leading to a lower quality of life. Our food is poisoned with chemicals that many countries have deemed illegal and unfit for human consumption. Nevertheless, we pay for them, spray them on our food, incorporate them in our processing facilities, and make it nearly impossible for Americans to not consume them. That poisoned food is normative speaks to either our government’s ineptitude or their unwillingness to prioritize our health.
Meanwhile, the pharmaceutical and medical industries are thriving. These industries have no financial incentive to make Americans healthy, instead, there is an incentive to maintain a revolving door of patients as lifelong customers. Moreover, our politicians' deafening silence on the health crisis seems to coincide with the amount of financial contributions proffered to their campaigns by these same industries.
In addition to the declining physical health of Americans, there is a decline in intrapersonal health and well-being. Social media, once promised to be a mechanism for fostering social cohesion and communal development has had the disastrous opposite effect. Rather than investing in each other's lives, we tear each other down and reinforce the very categorizations that belittle and demean the complexity of human growth and life. If there is a town square that aims to foster open discussions and dialogue, it is often clouded by the recommendations of algorithms that fuel our worst impulses and reinforce what we previously believed.
When conversations do occur, viewpoints and beliefs are presented that have largely been influenced by a media class dead-set on presenting you with the information that has been deemed politically appropriate for you to know. Their dependency is not on Truth, but on their financiers and advertisers who have their own political interests. We are often gaslit, told things did not occur that we blatantly remember. These lies and gaslighting have led to a distrust in the expert class as, more and more, their political interests are wedded to their field of expertise. Who do we trust? What information do we trust? How do we as truth seeking creatures gain knowledge about important issues when the sources of our information are so tainted with deception and manipulation?
All of this culminates in feelings of despair. We are lonelier and more isolated than ever before. Many of us feel a lack of purpose, sprinting on the never ending treadmill of working to live, yet never feel as if we’re actually living. This leads to exhaustion, depression, and a general sense of meaninglessness. However, there is no time to rest or reflect as the demands imposed by the increased cost of living requires us to keep sprinting. Sprinting to where? We do not yet know.
While this address is pessimistic, there is a glimmer of hope. The hope is that the current state of the union will awaken us and remind us of how much we have in common. You are not the only one struggling to make ends meet, your neighbor is as well. You are not the only one who is struggling to craft a meaningful life, your neighbor is as well. You are not the only one who is anxious about how things are or where they could go, your neighbor is as well. We must not believe the lie that we are merely the political caricatures foisted onto us by the political elite.
We must reject this lie or face our own continued destruction. For one of the greatest forces in resisting tyranny is to remember that we have vastly more in common than with those who seek to divide us for their own advantage.
Wrong Speak is a free-expression platform that allows varying viewpoints. All views expressed in this article are the author's own.
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Just to add to what you said, and not wanting to be negative but I wish you Americans would realise that all these divisive policies such as DEI (especially in the military), all this breaking-down of family units along with communities and society-at-large, the break down of health - all are like a gift to your adversaries who didn't even have to lift a finger to Make America Weak Again. It's sad. I've visited your country recently and met some wonderful people including being aided by some Good Samaritans. You deserve better than being stuck with the dividers.