What's Wrong

  

February 8, 2021

 Greetings from the observer,

 Before we go too far, I will share here that my credentials are flawed, but I am an observer of some experience, not without my own prejudices and blind spots.  But I have spent enough time in this role to have an understanding of my place, and that it is a gift at times.  This morning, I would share a sliver of what I have noticed as I make my way.

 In the last year, in the course of business, I have been in the homes of over three hundred strangers.  It is a unique dynamic, which I am accustomed to.   I am given this passport to travel into people’s lives, and after a short time I am seen in the same way you would consider a plumber or a visiting nurse.  People make conversation with me in the same way they would a fellow passenger on a train.

 It’s in this setting that people find a voice they may not always have. Sometimes it is loneliness, other times I am a well they can shout down into.  Often, often, I am asked a question.

  “You know what’s wrong with this country?”  This is never an inquiry for opinion, neither is it a rhetorical question.  It is obvious to you I know, but this is never, ever a question that wants an answer.  It is simply the placeholder where the speaker will stand to give their thoughts.

 Not that I have ever been tempted to offer my opinion.  I know well enough that perhaps this person has been arguing with the TV all day, and I may be the first real person they have as an audience.  And so, they ask.  “You know what’s wrong with this country?”  And then they tell me.

 Big government. The millennials. The radicals. Participation trophies.  Nobody wants to work.  You can’t make a living wage. Selfies.  Single parent families.  Wall street fat cats are getting rich while the rest of the country gets poorer. Racism.  Corrupt politicians.  Health care.  White supremacists. Gentrification.  The war. Immigrants.  White privilege. It’s guns.  It's social media.  It’s the loss of the front porch. Police shootings.  I have made notes, and the list is exhausting.

 Politics, age, religion, ethnicity, there are no barriers.  Everyone asks the question, everyone answers it.  I have listened to these thoughts, having heard their echo in years before. I have now had my feet in six decades of living, and in any span of time you can point to, I can remember people asking me some version of: “You know what’s wrong with this country?”

 Travel with me forty, thirty, twenty years back.  You know what’s wrong with this country?   It’s the hippies, and the war protestors.   Well, it’s the Yuppies and the DINKs, and the gays and the video games. Welfare. The war. Dying cities. Pollution.  It’s women taking men’s jobs.  It’s the price of gas. The president is too soft. It’s the economy.  It’s racial quotas.  It’s homelessness.  It’s food stamps.  It’s premarital sex.  It’s drugs.

 In my youth, I traveled around this country in a unique way that led me to be inside people’s lives and hear their beliefs and worries and hopes.  I sat at their kitchen tables in the late evenings, sat in small cafes in the hour before dawn, sat in camps of homeless, in mansions, in swamps, on mountain peaks, and wherever I met people they told me what they thought of where they lived, and the world that held it in place.  And often, someone would ask that question.

 Older people would point to the following generation, younger people would shake their heads at their elders.  White people and those of color would shovel at each other until they couldn’t see because of the holes they dug.  The poor would spit resentment at the wealthy, the rich would wonder why those less fortunate didn’t work harder.  Add politics and violence and the ecology and religion and sex and multiply until you get whatever version of your opinion of what’s wrong.

 Before I was reading anything but comics, John Steinbeck wrote ‘Travels With Charlie’, his record of wandering around the United States, to hear what it’s people were feeling, to reacquaint himself with the song of the place.  It was a different time, as I read it again I can hardly believe it is the same country.  But it is, and one thing hasn’t changed, people still asked the traveler the question. 

 You know what’s wrong with this country?  It’s the Russians.  It’s them coloreds.  It’s TV.  It’s women wearing pants.  It’s the communists.  It’s fluoride in the water.  No prayer in schools.  It’s this war.  It’s injustice in the south.  It’s the New York Jews.  It’s Hollywood.

 A friend of Steinbeck’s, a journalist covering the 1962 election campaign, said to him: “There used to be a thing or commodity we put great store by.  It was called the People. Find out where the People have gone.”  He meant that icon in the Declaration, We the People.  Steinbeck finally replied to him: “Maybe the People are always those who used to live the generation before the last.”

 I share this because I hope you will remember that the question has been with us as long as humans have lived together and been free to discuss the state of their lives wherever they lived.  In our country, a pretty fortunate place by many standards, there is plenty wrong, and I believe there is a hope to make more of it right. 

 “You know what’s wrong with this country?”  I’ll admit when I started writing this that I resented that what usually follows is someone’s intractable position, regardless of whether I agree with it or not.  But the truth is, in spite of my rankle, I can see now that this is the dialogue of the people.  No, it’s not the only introduction to respectful debate, but it is a pretty common way of expressing opinions. 

I think my place, and yours, is to think a moment longer before we ask, “You know what’s wrong with this country?”  Unless what follows is a thoughtful discussion that leads to understanding, and maybe solutions.  Don’t get mad at it, just think first, then ask.

The other thing I need to insert here is a confession of sorts.  Because I am what’s wrong with this country.  It’s not a surprise, really, since I am some of what this place is.  I am what’s wrong with this country.  I have been selfish.  I am racist. I am sexist.  I have been thoughtless in my attitudes about people who are different than I am, or who think differently.  I have taken police for granted.  I have ignored the hungry.  I have been indifferent about politics.  I have spoken harshly without understanding, I have been quiet when I should have defended those who needed it.  There’s more, but you have the idea. 

 The good news is I am what’s right with this country.  So are you.  We are the People.  We are what makes hope possible, what makes our country, and maybe our world, incrementally better from one day to the next.  One benefit in having my feet in six decades of living is that I can see some of the change that has come from our wrestling with the question.  Small changes, too slow, some would say, but we are gaining on it, our morality is evolving, we are learning to trade what’s wrong with this country for what could be.  We are inching toward our best selves.

 Hope this finds you what’s right,

 

David