The Deflation of a Nation

Photo by Jochen Frey. (License: Creative Commons Attribution)

1776 - Declaration of Independence
Both sides of my family had made it to the New World 100-150 years before this.

In the period from 1776 to 1861, from the declaration of our independence to the beginning of our civil war, we were involved with the consolidation of our inter-State cooperation and definition of the Union (through 1787 - Constitutional Convention), expanding westward (through 1848 - California), and fighting wars to defend and gain territory (through 1860 - War of 1812, Black Hawk War, Mexican-American War).

Then we fought each other.
My grandfather's grandfather had recently moved into my home State.

The Civil War happened 85 years after the Declaration of Independence. The United States of America wasn't a unified country until after the civil war. The unified States of America, before 1861, considered themselves to be a Union, in some ways similar to the European Union. Many States, or countries, unified. After the Civil War, the United States went from being a unified group of States to being a single State with many parts.

During the 52 years after the Civil War, we fought the Native Americans, Spain, and the Philippines; connected our coasts with the trans-continental railroad; began using motorized transportation, energy grids, artificial lighing, indoor plumbing; and built an industrial base that quickly became world-class. We had our own reserves of fuel for all of these endeavors and our skill in building machinery ensured that we were able to fuel our human resources as well.
My mother's family had moved into my home State by the end of this period.

We were able to win all the wars we won, because we live here. We were better equipped than the Native Americans and everyone else had to travel to fight us. It is still a long, long trip for an army.

Then we had WWI...ten years of good times...the Great Depression (during which, my father was born.), WWII (after which my mother was born), the birth of the Boomers, and the beginning of the Cold War.

The Cold War was a time of extreme growth and innovation, culminating in the technologically advanced world that we have today, but during which we saw multiple wars and had the constant looming cloud of nuclear war shadowing us in even the best of times, and the inherent dangers of our growing dominance began to rattle the nerves of our populace.
I was born during the Watergate period.

The Cold War finally ended and the World felt relief...the cloud had passed. There were murmurs that the public seemed to not notice about the next threat that we would surely face...terrorism, but it hadn't hit home yet. Many of the other troubles we face now had been on the radar, problems with: the climate, food, water, money, infrastructure, balance of world power, balance of internal power, population, populations--all of these had been mentioned years before we had to pay attention.

Instead we, the people, basked in the full sunshine and felt that we deserved it...our time in the sun. We smiled broadly and consolidated wealth and became selfish and uninterested in the rest of the world, we were looking in the mirror at the face of victory. Ten more years of good times.

After this, we got the wrong man for the job. More wrong than most. We were attacked. The climate data became undeniable. We began to move the mirror from in front of our face...because the President's face was one of the ones looking back at us...and now see, again, that the world around us is engaged, and we can't be disengaged and still be a part of it...and we certainly can't be predominant without engagement.
My daughter is 16 months old.

We've had eight years of deflation, which is a long time in our short history. My grandfather told me a story that his grandfather told him about the Civil War. That story, so little removed in time from my experience, took place at a point nearly two-thirds of the way back to the founding of our country.

We are fully able to overcome the obstacles we face as a nation in this world. We've done it before. After a good long look at ourselves, we're realizing that we have to be more open and more forgiving and more tolerant. We thought we were already good at those things, but the stakes are always high whether we are paying attention or not. We have to continually strive to practice what The Constitution preaches because we will never fully achieve that goal and any time we relax our efforts, we will always slide backwards.

We should be comforted some...by the fact that the people of our country are more awake now. The younger generations are more engaged than ever. We know that it isn't going to be easy and we know that we have to take the lead as a country with the power that we have. We have to understand that we can only do this by working together. Our partisan political system seems to inflate and bristle when the country deflates like this, but we have to willfully restore some balance and willfully engage in constructive compromise.

Our country has only extremely recently enjoyed being solely predominant in the world. Our country should act as a steward while in this position in the world, the same way that the President is supposed to be a steward of our country while in his position. We should remember that we are not used to being on top, and maybe we shouldn't get used to it. We're good at being underdogs, at striving for impossible perfection. We have always fallen short, we always will, but we can only progress by reaching for the goals that we set only so long ago.

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