A Little Part of It in Everyone

Daily, we are bombarded with messages on television, whether pep talks from news anchors and actors or PSAs that "We Are All In This Together".  Are we?  I wonder.

It has been said that a national tragedy reveals much about a President in that many Americans take a cue regarding how to react and how to process what has happened by looking at what the President does. The Challenger disaster happened on January 28, 1986. President Reagan's State of the Union address was scheduled for that night. He did not give it. Instead, sitting behind his desk in the Oval Office, he delivered a pitch-perfect address - a eulogy almost - honoring the seven astronauts who had lost their lives.  On September 20, 2001, nine days after the 09/11 attacks, President Bush addressed the nation and a joint session of Congress, noting that although the President comes to Congress typically to report on the state of the union he need not do that because in the days since the attacks, Americans had shown the world how strong we were. 

For months following the 09/11 attacks, we the people of these United States seemed a bit less partisan than we had been in the days and weeks that preceded them.  We seemed more tolerant of one another's differences of opinion and political beliefs.  We seemed to sense that having been given but one communal canoe, we had to dedicate our efforts to paddling it together and purposefully in order to get through what had happened. 

Where has that gone? 

Do not misunderstand.  On a daily basis, Americans do extraordinary things to assist one another in these terrible, trying times.  But we also do unspeakable things, such as murder a store security guard in cold blood after he tells a potential customer she must leave the store because she has chosen to disregard the store's policy mandating all who enter wear a face covering.  

It is overly simplistic and, perhaps, a little unfair to lay the blame for the atmosphere of intolerance and insolence entirely at the feet of the Provocateur-in-Chief but he certainly deserves a heaping share of it.  Having spent a lifetime trying to mask his own failings and shortcomings by demeaning and deriding others, if you believed for a minute that shoulder-deep in a national crisis his lethal combination of arrogance and ignorance helped create that he would be in anything other than perpetual attack mode, then you have simply failed to pay attention.  

Have we the people of these United States, having waded through the muck and mire of partisan political bullshit for so long, poisoned the national reservoir of cooperative spirit that has served us well for two hundred and fifty years beyond the point of no return?  As a Pop Pop whose oldest grandchild turned three earlier this month, I certainly hope not.  As an educated, informed man whose eyes are wide open and have never looked at the world through rose-colored glasses, I fear we have. 

I've seen the needle and the damage done. 

-AK