We Americans accept being boxed in. We’re put into packages and treated as commodities, divvied up in opinion-rated groupings.
Data describing us are manipulated in algorithms. We are labeled sought for votes, to buy merchandise and services, to believe propaganda. We lose our individuality and become cookies collected by clouds of servers.
We the people are now valuable only as party members or sympathizers, customers, churchgoers, secularists, welfare recipients, youths, professionals, retirees, second-home buyers, pensioners, investors, gays, straights, African Americans, Hispanics, employed, unemployed, male, female, 47 percenters, one percenters, the elite, the hoi polloi, and on and on. Maybe -- likely -- we are no longer a people, a nation. We are lemmings of varying breeds.
But are we victims, or willing self-sorters?
Observe fellow human beings with eyes fixed on hand-held blinking electronics, texting, gaming, foisting on “friends” our every movement and thought. Some communicate electronically as they sit side-by-side.
Those coveting gain or profit for themselves just see factions or blocs. Those seeking our attention, our money, our votes like it that way. Our political parties aim to succor -- and sucker -- particular groups for selfish ends.
Such rips in our societal fabric are fundamental impediments to national as well as individual progress.
A certain cultural adhesion existed in American down through the early and mid-decades of the last century despite major problems. Manners, dress, entertainment, religious membership and other measures of life varied little across the country despite Prohibition, labor unrest, Depression.
A blight to that cohesion was bigotry. Extremism in the form of lynchings, the Klu Klux Klan, Jim Crow, religious discrimination, and similar divisiveness were not condemned as those ought to have been condemned. As is true now, those shameful attitudes were not shared by everyone. Nonetheless, similar values were recognized across racial and religious lines. Note current books and articles regarding changes in the black families.
In the twenties, Prohibition loosened moral standards.
In the thirties, economic woes hit every class in varying degrees.
In the forties, the war effort united the home front despite rationing and a few cheaters. War plants brought women into the workforce to stay.
In the late forties and the fifties, the GI Bill broadened the educated class that gradually changed cultural appetites. Rock and Roll emerged.
In the sixties, the primitive political polling that began in the previous decade led to marketing surveys that found tastes differed in everything from clothing, to music, to reading, to movie and TV viewing, to business products and to services. Vietnam brought political fractures. Drugs were used openly.
In the seventies, the differences between age groups became more pronounced. Language became less civil, more vulgar. Drug abuse increased, marijuana use defended.
Since then, like Cole Porter wrote in the thirties, “Anything Goes.” A glimpse of stocking hasn’t been shocking for many a decade, in fact, what ever happened to stockings?
What was once considered amoral, abnormal or immoral behavior is fodder for entertainment and for omnipresent video-phones and thus wide distribution. The use of certain words and phrases has thrust political correctness into a fractured society.
Race and ethnic and religious differences are the most serious.
Just mentioning these divides can set off controversy. So many American families have stories of great-grandparents or grandparents facing discrimination before assimilating into the population. Human nature takes its time in welcoming cultural integration, which is fundamental to the American way.
American may not be dead in the water, but our stasis may stem from wilfully separating racial, ethnic, religious, and economic groups into splinters for gain. Partisan gain. Ego trips by certain leaders. Turmoil for racial purposes. Proselytization gains for religious groups. Envy for many nefarious reasons.
No one, it should be hoped, actually wishes to squeeze the American population into a monolith. If we were all alike, we would not be Americans.
“Can we all get along?” Rodney King’s rhetorical question remains legitimate despite circumstances surrounding his 1991 arrest in Los Angeles. No judgment here of his or similar cases. Yet, getting along is at the heart of the American experiment.
Some leader needs to step up and attack disunity, a problem so obvious and yet so ignored.
Can discussion without bombast of our dysfunction be completely ineffective? Is name-calling and sound-bite spouting the only way to drag the subject of disunity into the public square?
Countries with nearly solid ethnic identities experience internal disputes. Our nation, with its panoply of races, ethnic, and religious identities, and various cultural tastes, never has and never will find complete harmony. Those seminal thinkers who wrote our founding documents knew problems would arise. They relied on a built-in tension, no branch of government more dominant than another. The hoped for equilibrium is teetering but standing.
We don’t have to give up our cultural proclivities. Profit seekers will not give up merchandizing tools. But we do have to pay a lot more attention to our duties as citizens. It ts possible to make our country the “more perfect union” the Preamble seeks.
Somehow our national motto can be fulfilled --- we can make one out of many.
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