The good old USA is an empire. We stand atop the world like a giant colossus. We rank with other empires long gone: Rome, Greece, Persia, Macedonia and more recently, Spain, the Netherlands, France and England. Our last great challenger was the USSR and they’re now gone, beaten, demolished.
There are many would-be contenders, but most are not even close, probably decades before they catch up to the U.S.
We are affluent as a country well beyond the dreams of previous generations. We are personally affluent, I’m sure for many of us, well beyond our grandparents’ dreams.
So why are we so miserable?
Why are we so angry?
Why are our children running to school with guns to kill each other?
Why, in the midst of plenty, don’t we feel better about ourselves?
Someone suggested to me today that one reason we feel bad might be that we have a culture that glorifies bad guys. In our movies and on TV, bad guys frequently win. Not only do they win, but they’re also beloved and they often ride off into the sunset with the girls and the goodies.
Take a look at Tony Soprano, who is practically evil incarnate. But he doesn’t appear to be so bad. He loves his children and his marinara sauce and he’s sensitive enough to tell his shrink his troubles. So the lines between good and evil seem less solid.
Some would have us reinstate a code that says only good guys win.
And that’s all we can show in hopes it would solve the problem and make us feel better. But it would be roundly rejected, because the reality of life is that bad guys do win. Not always, but often enough to make you wonder.
I think we have deep cultural problems with accepting that everything comes with a price and that life doesn’t just go one way — up. Reality requires that we accept there are rhythms to life and things do change. Of course, ups are preferred, but there are always some downs.
Tony Soprano pays a price all the time, which is one of the reasons we like to watch him. But since we’re good people, we personally believe we should be exempt from that price.
If you could have told that kid in Santee who shot up his fellow students that the price he was going to pay for his vengeance was enormous and forever, maybe he would have stopped. If you could have said to him, this too would pass, and he believed it, maybe he wouldn’t have pulled the trigger — “Believe me, kid, 20 years from now high school will be nothing more than a memory, a distant, and for many like you, unpleasant memory.” If, in the future, he’d gone to his 10-year high school reunion, he would have found that life wasn’t always so kind to the most popular or best-looking kid, or the star athlete. No one gets a permanent pass on bad times. Then there is always the kid everyone admired who went home and put a bullet into his head and it leaves you wondering why.
This inability to accept that everything comes with a price isn’t just a disease of adolescence. It’s a much larger cultural disease we all share. Look at the stock market. Yesterday was practically Black Thursday. What happened?
Suddenly, many of us decided that there really is a business cycle. If it can go up, it also can go down, so we’d better get out. Is this any great revelation? Should we be miserable, depressed, jumping out of windows because there is a business cycle and there really are two directions?
What is the business reality? The reality is, the last couple of years were great years and the next few probably aren’t going to be as great. But for most companies, this means they’ll be off 10 or 20 percent, and in time, if they’re sound, as most of them are, they’ll come back.
“Not good enough,” say most people. This is really the hub of the problem. We want a painless world. All ups, no downs — don’t bother me with the details. In our instant culture this has come to mean not only no downs but also no discomfort, no delays, no uncomfortable experiences, and everything should be even and smooth and fair, as long as we win, of course.
This is not reality and we are paying a very heavy price for expecting this unreality. We appear to be chronically unhappy and discontent. We live in a place that our grandparents would think was heaven, yet we’re constantly miserable. We’ve lost our sense of proportion. Many equate a momentary loss of cable service with the same weight as we would the arrival of the Cossacks in the old days.
If we are to get happy, we’re going to have to get real and teach our children to also get real and maybe they’ll stop killing each other.