Felling the tree ...

A pessimist (which I am regularly accused of being) might suggest that the failings of the United States are astonishing. We will not even provide for our children to go to the movies without being murdered by a mad-man with a 100 round (One-hundred-fucking-rounds!) assault rifle. The NRA was in full throttled defense of such weapons before all the bodies were removed from the theater. The voice of the American People? “Yep, we need these weapons to protect ourselves from the government …

… in a democracy, where we are the government.

Then again, we have elected a government who hates government and then makes sure that the government doesn’t work. Well, that isn’t exactly true. We have elected a government that works for the rich and the elite. (Though that is ultimately untenable, when the riots come and the cities burn, a lot of the rich will be rich no longer.) A democracy who hates its government is a people who hate themselves; which is a pretty good description of America right now. (And is also why the riots are coming and the cities are going to burn. We do so hate ourselves.)

You would think that would puzzle most Americans since they all claim to be good Christians. But it doesn’t work that way. Christians are pretty intolerant with anyone who isn’t a Christian, and they seem to be as intolerant with about half the “other” people who also claim be Christians. It is only Christians who get their knickers in a twist over gay people. It is mostly Christians who demand the world’s biggest military in order to be protected from the un-godly Muslims. (I just love the fact that it is the right-wing American Christians who think that the middle-wing Christian Obama must be a Muslim in Christian drag.) It is white Christians who find immigrants intolerable (though they are all sons and daughters of immigrants themselves). It is the rich Christians who bitch about paying a pittance in taxes when those taxes go to helping poor people. (They don’t mind when the taxes buy weapons.) And, of course, public education is a particular target of the American Christian right; who apparently think that “bible school” and “education” are somehow synonymous.

Which sounds like I really don’t like Christians, but nothing could be further from the truth. There are parts of Christian ideology that I find childish and egotistical, but some of the people I love most in the world are Christians. Once upon a time in America there was a branch of Christianity that was progressive, anti-war, and pro-civil rights for all human beings (as they were all created in the image of god). There was a Christianity that had no fear of learning about the cosmos and our place in it, a Christianity that believed theirs was a God of social justice, of caring for the poor, of educating the uneducated, housing the homeless and clothing the naked. They even found some parts of the Bible that described such a God, and held those parts up as “truth.” To those Christians love was the watchword; a word that meant tolerance, compassion, and justice. If we were that kind of “Christian Nation” we might still be a shining light for the world.

But we’re not.

Apart from our ideological baggage, we are suffering from just horrible decision making and management. The country’s infrastructure is collapsing. Public services are being abandoned. (The Mail Service is going bankrupt? Someone actually imagines you can have a first world society without mail service?) Millions are uninsured, and poverty is spreading at record levels. Poverty? Isn’t capitalism supposed to be raising all the boats? These are not ideological problems, just basic management and leadership. Unfortunately management and leadership are impossible in an atmosphere as poisoned with religion, fundamentalism, and shear bile as is ours. It’s hard to imagine how we go into this political, mutual suicide pact. But we have.

So this is a society that cannot survive … and saying so makes me a pessimist.

Yet I don’t see it that way. A tree grows in the forest; rot invades its very core. The outside looks strong but the inside is hollow, yet it towers over the rest still laying down a shadow of its former glory. As it begins to falter insects take up home and then threaten all the trees in the area. What little fruit that grows is small, shriveled, devoid of nutrients and poor food for the animals and birds. Every puff of breeze brings down limbs that threaten the small, new trees trying to take root and any creature not quick enough to get out of the way. The tree has become a kind of cancer seeping illness into the very ground from whence it grew. Nothing within reach is completely immune from the effects as the tree poisons everything around it.

When a strong wind finally brings the old giant down there is a horrendous crash, animals and birds flee in panic, new growth lying too close to the old giant gets crushed.

But then things get better. What was poison and illness and death is absorbed back into the ground and turned into good soil. Something new grows in place of the old and corrupted, something slightly different and (so evolution teaches us) likely a bit better adapted to the environment. It will be just that little bit stronger and just that little bit healthier for the forest as a whole.

America is rotten in its core. It has sold out to dollars and ego; to the weapons manufacturers and the war mongers. In spite of all the evidence to the contrary we, the American people, still claim to be the best in the world and demand the rest of the world treat us as such. We are a country ruinously out of control, killing ourselves off with the same enthusiasms as the Muslims. A Shite carries a bomb into a Sunni funeral and murders as many as he can. A man walks into a Denver movie theater and murders as many as he can. A sizable portion of each population approves. Not directly of course, but there are no serious demonstrations by either Muslims or gun owners at the carnage carried out by one of their own.

Has the NRA voiced a single concern that Denver killer had access to such firepower? Of course not, their answer is that everyone in the movie theater should have pulled out their own weapon and opened fire. Which is, let us be perfectly clear, utter and absolute insanity. But you know that in today’s America their argument is going to carry the day. The only way that happens is that Americans are utterly and absolutely insane. (If the Christian god that could make us a great nation once again actually existed, His heaven would be off limits to any card carrying member of the NRA. If the Christain god that the NRA worships actually existed, we would be living in an cosmos of unimaginable evil and hope would be unknown to human kind.)

This tree has to fall soon – and that is an optimist talking.

It could be that Americans will find a way to drop the tree in a controlled manner. We might still decide that allowing mad-men access to portable weapons of mass murder is shear stupidity. We could find a way to drive much of the corruption out of our political system in spite of the Supreme Court. The Republican and Democratic parties are not sacred institutions that will last forever. Once upon a time the Republican party was the one that freed the slaves while the Democrats retreated into Jim Crow states. There was a time when the Democrats were actually anit-war. And once upon a time they worked together to build a first world society that reached the moon and tried to insure that capitalism actually did raise all the boats.

We may (it is just barely imaginable) find a god to worship who loves knowledge and progress and justice once again. It might be that we empty the jails of people who have done no real harm and fill them with people who have. (Let the pot smokers out and put the Wall Street managers in.) It isn't out of the question that we remember the Gross National Product as the least important measurement of a healthy society; that celebrity is meaningless, and it is the people who actually do the work who matter. It may be that we reject the idiots who claim that greed is good, and look again to those who know that a people divided against themselves cannot survive. We might even realize that war is an enterprise in which both sides lose while the truly evil among us make a profit.

Such a society would be far different than the one we live in now; it would not be the same tree. Corporate managers would not make 100 times what those on the shop floor do, and pay fewer taxes. We would not care about “big government” or “small government” but rather “good government”. And we would realize that bad people do not a good government make.

We could, but we probably won’t.

Either way, the tree will still fall.