Oh, America

Oh, America, to be back into your swirling logos and your ceaseless chaos! Your nature has been one of chaos since your very birth, your bloody inception. Childhood in America—the 90’s. Seems like a far-off daydream, seems wrapped in innocence, those long afternoons riding bikes, rolling in the grass and the dirt, imitating and perfecting wrestling moves. Anytime before the internet hit like an atom bomb—seems otherworldly, antiquated, only a memory remains, but this sounds about right.

9/11 was an attack, but also an assassination. The assassination of a dream—awakened, now, a generation’s assumptions blasted away on live television. That was 25 years ago. Hardly would make sense to a thinking person—it was that long ago.

The years are blending in and bleeding onto one another. And then there is the claim that nothing has happened in the past 20 years. American culture has frozen. Every contribution reaches into the bucket of the past, vying for a reminder of what once was. About this claim, I am not entirely sure, but one instantly gets the sentiment—there is truth in it, let us say.

America is in the thick of its own discomfort, its own growing pains. American culture has not disappeared, but has rather calcified, crystallized itself into something utterly recognizable—we see the same films, hear the same songs ad nauseam. We crave the past; we wish to crawl back into it. The future is plagued with more pain, the light at the end of the tunnel is obscured, and the pathways forward are not clear.

The structures that we once felt safe relying upon have been shattered. And I mean this beyond the reliable, nameable structures of daily life, daily survival. This is not only a matter of forms to fill out, government programs, healthcare, etc. This sentiment has lodged itself into the hearts of many Americans. It is spiritual, existential, I will put it. It cannot be named totally, only described, only observed.

When I hear of America’s destruction—somebody will call it—has America as we know it been destroyed? Is the path towards its own destruction inevitable? Has it already been set in motion? Is this so-called destruction at the hands of a particular political party? A particular persuasion, or president? America, if it is said to be destroyed or its destruction imminent, can only be destroyed from within. Whoever the culprit is, we look to the citizens of a nation, that is to say, ourselves.

America cannot be destroyed in the way we think about destruction, and if it were, it has the potential to be resurrected, rejuvenated, revitalized. None of this will come from war, not from political solutions. I have the idea that America is seeing itself through another stage, another evolution, another writhing through the growing pains of its infancy.

Throughout the entirety of its short history, all roads have led the country to this day, this current state of affairs. The people of the United States can be rightly accused of sleepwalking—where comfort rules the day to day, and that state of half-consciousness has caused much to slip away from notice, from accountability, from investment. But I am no patriot; I never much jived with that word. I hear it, and I become claustrophobic...

Just the other day, I was asked how living back in America has been after those years being away.

“Especially now,” he said, referring to the general lowly state of affairs. But I hadn’t asked myself, not totally. Not enough to give myself a real answer. But if anything, living far away for so long allowed me to recognize the things about America I love. And there are many things about Americans that I love.

Still, amid numerous scandals and problems, and after being away from America for years, my return to my country is filled with a sense of optimism. With all the talk of money and price, America is still the economic envy of the world. Still, there are opportunities beyond what the average American can fathom, especially when compared to most of the world, and the relative difficulty one may find climbing up any social or economic ladder. In America, furniture is everywhere. We hardly notice it. People are giving furniture away...

The decline in American morale, where there is a collective feeling of anxiety, pessimism, and even rage about the country’s future, is something of an inevitability. I see it. America’s life cycle would be too incomplete not to have gone through those clumsy teenage years of angst and turmoil about its future. America and Americans will not be an evolved society until it faces a kind of imminent collapse, where its complete destruction seems every bit as real as it does likely.

Generations have been broken before in America—Slavery. The Great Depression. The World Wars. Assassinations. These events are relatively recent, but are at once near us and ancient history. With all the shiny new artifacts of our future—the internet, Artificial Intelligence, cars that drive themselves, online shopping, none can be said to save us from an existential malaise.

America feels, in many ways, ready to burst, or break, or sink or swim. It feels like on the brink—I just cannot say what on the brink of. But perhaps this is its nature—to feel as though it has always been testing its own elasticity to chaos. America, it seems, must come up against the inevitable—to be tested and tried through terms like fascism, oligarchy, nepotism, nationalism, authoritarianism, terrorism, capitalism (use prefix of your choice), and depression. Not so much the economic depression here, but a spiritual depression. I use the term spiritual not to refer to god, or any gods, but to describe the nature of the problem best I can.

America, as a nation, has a shadow self. A self built largely on memorabilia, trinkets of the past, sacred stories, and assumptions about the future. But it takes only a single individual to hold up an honest mirror, to reveal an honest reflection. We may put our anger and rage into the mirror holder, but it is the reflection that has to be confronted first.

Wrong Speak is a free-expression platform that allows varying viewpoints. All views expressed in this article are the author’s own.