Dear America,
I have been watching the news with a certain unease lately because has sometimes been the case in my experience the news is history unfolding, and not just ordinary, day-to-day history. There are times when momentus change seems imminent given the news of the day, as when President Kennedy took to the airwaves one night when I was in high school and told the world that only the Soviet Union could pull us back from the brink of the abyss. That was the climax of the Cuban missile crisis, and I went to bed that night believing that I might not awaken in the morning...that none of us would. And there have been other historic moments in the lives of those of us of a certain age: Richard Nixon flashing a peace sign as he boarded a helicopter on the White House lawn for the last time; people clinging to another helicopter at the American embassy in Saigon as it carried the last Americans away from the imminent peril of the change of Vietnamese dominion from that of an American ally to that of an American foe. I saw Neil Armstrong on television walking on the moon before any other man ever did, and before that, I remember watching a Yankee game as a young boy one day when the announcer told us all that the Russians had just put Sputnik in orbit...another moment of deep foreboding; if they could go into space, what more could they do...to us. But the anxiety I feel today based on what I see on the news has had a more subtle etiology. It hasn't been one seminal event or speech. It has been a torrent of news that has intensified over the past few years to the point today at which it seems quite clear to me that seismic change is not just in our future but imminent.
Start with the refugee crisis in Europe. Masses of people are fleeing conflict areas around the Mediterranean, and they are, for the most part, Muslims being driven away from their homes by other Muslims. There is Chaos in Libya, fractious insurgency in Syria and sectarian violence in Iraq at the hands of not just ISIL but the militias that purport to be attempting to vindicate Iraq and its sovereignty but in reality seem to be retaliating against the Sunni's who dominated Iraq in similarly brutal fashion just a little more than a decade ago. Then there is American politics with Donald Trump eliciting the worst from a not insignificant number of Americans who see his xenophobia and jingoism as an American heritage. There is Bernie Sanders pointing out that the class divide in America...and the world for that matter...that manifests itself in obscene wealth juxtaposed with heart-wrenching poverty has become intolerable and must be rectified. Even Hillary Clinton is mouthing like sentiments, as is the only other Democratic aspirant to the party's presidential nomination, Martin O'Malley. Then there is the latest stock market dive, which does affect everyone with retirement funds in a 401(k) account while they sit powerlessly and watch it happen. There are acts of gun violence in which people are being killed for being who they are, most recently live and in color on the television news, while our government denies that there is anything that can be done about guns when everyone knows that such is not the case because there is no other country in the world that suffers from such violence on anything near the scale on which, nor with anything approaching the frequency with which, we suffer it. And surrounding these major stories are, to paraphrase George H.W. Bush, a thousand points of darkness that anyone paying attention can see. There is the obdurate resistance to the Affordable Care Act out of political allegiance with complete disregard for the good the law has done, and there is the resistance to the reform of our financial system under the Dodd-Frank Act, a provision of which, incidentally, will go into effect in 2018 requiring major corporations to publish the ratio between the amounts they pay their CEO's and what their average workers earn, and that can be expected to crystalize the momentum toward equalizing wealth, or at least making its distribution more equitable.
Perhaps I am hysterical in nature, but I see a common thread and a conflation of impact in these events and phenomena. The refugees want decent lives and they are willing to die trying to find them. The countervailing pressures within the Muslim world--not just between religious factions but between haves and have-nots as well--seems ready to erupt into confrontations like the Yemeni civil war in which rich Saudi Arabia is stepping on the neck of its impoverished neighbor because a potentially threatening political wave is sweeping over the country. That is part of the same refugee crisis in that there are wealthy Arab nations like Egypt and Saudi Arabia alongside poor ones that are now not only poor but are besieged by fundamentalism as well. It is all of a piece, this strife between those who have been backed into a corner and those who have backed them into it. It is the ultimate class war. It is between those with power that they have misused for self-aggrandizement and those with no power other than their numbers who seem more and more likely to realize that there is no place else for them to flee, so they must now consider turning to fight.
All of this may blow over. The tidal wave of refugees may wane and there may be peaceful resolution of the disparity between the well-being of the rich and that of the poor. We may reform what needs reform, both in the middle east and here and throughout the world, and we may do it in a peaceful and orderly fashion. As to the threat of cataclysm in America, I have always been among those who believe that it can't happen here. But the tolerance of the vast majority of human beings has been sorely tested these past few decades, and the pot certainly looks ready to boil over.
Your friend
Mike
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