Gus Speth shares an essay on America today, reflecting my own thinking exactly. T

Friends, some reflections, from an American perspective.  Gus

Disturbing the Peace

     From my perch of 83 years, it is easy to recall deplorable developments in recent American history. I think of the Vietnam war and Watergate as well as pervasive conditions like racism and materialism. We should be hardened, but this moment of concurrent atrocities – Gaza genocide, democratic decline, climate change, human deprivation amid obscene wealth, and more, all further fueled by a flawed US president – this moment does disturb one to the core, in part because it raises the specter of our loss of ability to correct our course and set things right, of a country that could be in the process of irretrievable decline. The only credible response is to fight back with ferocity, to mount barriers in every way and place we can.

                                                         ***

     When economic inequality mocks political equality, democratic progress is difficult. When corporate power dwarfs people power, democratic progress is difficult. When big money is the basis of campaign success, democratic progress is difficult. When the voting public is subjected to repeated lies and endless misinformation and propaganda, democratic progress is difficult. When neither future generations nor the natural world are accorded political standing, democratic progress is difficult. A broken democracy in a broken society needs fundamental change. In the meanwhile, we must win with what we have.

                                                      ***

     As I plow through the decades of books I’m giving away while listening to versions of Pachelbel’s canon, I am overcome by the story of so many people trying so hard for so long in so many ways and yet so much is being lost that I have to take a break and cry and hope that this feeling of devastation will pass and I will carry on and get these books sorted and to the library before it is too late. There are answers in these books. We are not lost. We know what should be done.

                                                        ***

     Throughout American history there have been competing visions of the American Dream. One, the Consumer Republic, has powered the rise of commercialism and a particularly ruthless variety of winner-take-all capitalism. But there has always been an alternative. It is a vision of an America where the pursuit of happiness is sought in the growth of civic virtue and in devotion to the public good, where the Dream is steadily realized as average Americans of all varieties achieve their human potential, where the benefits of economic activity are widely and fairly shared, and where the virtues of simple living, community solidarity, and conservation of nature predominate. This tradition has not prevailed to date, but it is not dead. It awaits us and, indeed, is being awakened today across this great land. It beckons us with a new American Dream, one rebuilt from the best of the old and drawing on the best of who we were and are and can be. It is a vision of America the Beautiful.

                                                                    ***