Ain’t No Molehill High Enough
In the late 80’s and early 90’s, when the Soviet Union was collapsing, one of my oldest friends married a Russian woman he had met in the Ukraine. She didn’t love the Soviet Union. She hated it. An only child, she grew up with her mother waiting on long lines to get the simplest things, things we take for granted. Meat. Soap. When she came to America many things intimidated her. She didn’t know how to go to a doctor, and was afraid she’d need to bribe or do a favor to get medical help. But she was proud of being a Russian, and the collapse of the Soviet Union was something she found sad. She did not love the Soviet system, but Soviet power was something that she had taken pride in without really realizing it.
The decades since our ‘triumph’ over communism have been grim. America’s collapse follows on the heels of our adversary. Our economy has been driven by bubble after bubble, each one increasing in size until the last one consumed all of the economies of the world. Our military misadventures have become bolder and more inane. Now the Russians can laugh as they see us spiral into the nihilistic business of waging war in Afghanistan, the triggering event for Soviet collapse. But what is maybe most depressing of all, leaving aside ideology for a moment, is the collapse of our ambitions. Not our international ambitions, which have been shameful, but our domestic ones. With the crumbling of civic society has come the crumbling of infrastructure. And we can’t even decide to rebuild it, much less upgrade it into something that will be useful in the future. There is a crisis in health care and the talk is of raising the age at which people can collect Medicare, as opposed to extending Medicare to younger people. With our increased lifespan we have decreased opportunities for work, declining Social Security benefits, eliminated pension plans. Just as the economy requires larger and larger numbers of people with advanced degrees, the cost of education puts it beyond the scope of most people. Their choice is then crippling debt or working at Walmart. I am glad the deficit Super Committee failed, since I assume it would have done more harm than can be calculated. But the failure is depressing too because it confirms what is evident everyday: that we cannot even solve the easy problems. The level of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere is the highest ever. Scientists confidently report that we will have increased adverse weather patterns that will cause some areas of the globe to become uninhabitable. The work in this area has been clear for over ten years. But the Republicans deny it is happening and Democrats can’t unite enough to force climate legislation through congress and the American people wonder whether Black Friday is a morning or evening event. OWS may represent the 99% but the percent of people who both give a shit and have the minimum knowledge to discuss or act on our problems appears to be less than the number of mega-rich. I won’t miss all the bad we do. But I have no confidence that the countries that will rush in to fill the vacuum will do any better. People on the right say people like me hate America. The country I hate is the country that can’t tie its shoelaces. This is not a democracy. It is not a republic. It is a Potemkin Village, built on a molehill.
