“Hey, look! Now We have the Code to the Nukes! He-he!”
Our leaders, like most of us, are unfortunately stuck in a perpetual state of adolescence. What caused this?
To the casual observer, we must look like complete fools. Our leaders jockey for position like kids in school, trying to obtain glory within the most popular clique available and showing absolutely no scruples. Look at us! What have we come to? Have special interests and the lure of corporate backers taken over principle and valor?
Take Nancy Pelosi — she is like the girl in high school who is always on the outside, trying to drum up support with everyone else by finding fault with all the other cliques. She’ll point fingers because she does not want anybody looking too closely at herself.
And then William Barr — he is the kid trying to be well-liked by the cool group and will do whatever it takes to find favor while not ruffling anyone’s feathers.
What is going on? Where are the adults in the room?
Donald Trump is the one who knows the business well, trying to let everyone else know what they need to do for their financial futures. He is full of himself and his ideas and doesn’t care about popularity, just getting things done no matter who he upsets along the way.
Barack Obama is the cool kid who wants to keep his position of popularity, but by pleasing everybody, he has effectively become ineffective when he was needed the most, so he keeps reminding everyone of his past glory.
Adam Schiff is the one who nobody likes, and so he finds favor by doing what others would never want to do themselves. They put him up to do what they want, and he acts the part well, but you can’t believe a word he says.
We can do better than this, I know if we try, we can become adults again.
Michael Pence and Mitch McConnel don’t know how they got to be in one of the main peer groups, but now that they are there, they try to play the role well. Like other Republicans, they will bend and sway with the popular views day-to-day so you can never rely upon them.
Freshmen Democrats are the yappy followers of the cool kids who have all sorts of bright ideas that nobody wants to hear.
Joe Biden is the goofy one, sort of like the class clown. You want to like him and go along with his jokes, but you know something’s off deep inside, and so you wind up laughing at him.
We have much dissention in our government and amongst our leaders, but we always had. Difference now, is that nobody wants to come together:
Kamala Harris is the one you feel sorry for since she has let it be known that she has been through so much heartache, and yet you stay away from her because she insists you see things her way and no other way is acceptable.
And finally, Hillary and Bill Clinton are the former prom queen and king. Like the fabulous couple we all knew in high school who had all sorts of problems but managed to stick it out, the queen distrusts all men now and takes revenge upon them when she can since her own king had jaded her when it mattered the most. She has reeled him in finally, but all happiness has fled home.
Is there a true leader in sight? Our government leaders are supposed to represent us, and is it any wonder they are all acting a bit confused? As a culture and as a people, we have become so far apart on the Principle/Freedom-Morality scale.
Think of this as a line with freedom on one side and morality on the other. Principles rise above this line and they stand alone no matter which side of this line you are on. However, since you cannot have freedoms without, by necessity, impinging upon someone else’s view of morality … that is why we are hopelessly stuck where we are now.
Problem is that principles should not be affected even if someone is all the way for freedom or all in on morality. But unfortunately, that is not the case, and our culture’s principles have now also become tarnished in this current political/societal/cultural climate.
By definition, Principle means, according to Dictionary.com: an accepted or professed rule of action or conduct. A personal or specific basis of conduct or management, along with a guiding sense of the requirements and obligations of right conduct.
We have become so desperate to have others validate our stance on the freedom/morality line, that we have lost sight of the bigger picture. It is obvious from the outside looking in (as the world might view Americans at this time), that we are all looking for a more enlightened and mature parent to accept us, and to tell all the other kids that we are right and they must follow along with our viewpoints.
Our society is burdened by growing pains that we all should have outgrown long ago! What China sees, and so does most of the rest of the world for that matter— is that the days of adults running our America have been long past. We are riddled with adolescent angst all the way to the top of our government, most likely because we are also stuck as a culture in a perpetual state of disenchantment. Our representatives are trying to placate us, sort of like our teachers and principals from high school.
Moral right hits moral left in the face, and moral left just wants to have more fun without any of the guilt moral right wants to throw at them. Why? I believe it is because we had been fixated far too long in a perpetual state of prudishness which completely disavowed as immoral anything which seemed at all wanton, and we had no legitimate parameters to depend upon between the standards which had been set way too high in the first place.
As individuals within this culture, we soon became displeased with our own lives after an initial burst of freedom, and when buying more and more trinkets could not replace the true source of our angst … that being the need to grow up, we felt alienated from ourselves and from one another. We have the urge to improve our lives, but we do so usually by finding a source outside of ourselves that we think will replace the emptiness. We truly just need to accept limits that life itself imposes upon us and all humanity without regard to prejudice or stereotype.
For instance, many of us were not ready for the commitment of marriage, and so we settled because it was the only thing we could do while saving our reputations. We were not ready for the commitment of a long-term relationship because we had yet to accept the state of being which would reconcile within ourselves both ends of the moral spectrum — principle versus freedom. Not knowing where we stood, we faked it.
Many in our culture, including most of our leaders, are looking for others outside ourselves, those who seem to be mature, to lead us in the way of maturity by making us accept what we cannot do for ourselves — the fact that we cannot have things both ways in life. We must choose a point somewhere along that line between morality and freedom, and we must adhere to it without floundering decades more before we do so.
Since nobody wanted to deal with the complicated issues which would arise should we stand firm in our fixed chosen point on the line, we have fixated at the stage of development defined by adolescence.
Adolescence: the transitional period between puberty and adulthood in human development, extending mainly over the teen years and terminating legally when the age of majority is reached. The process or state of growing to maturity — a period or stage of development, as of a society, preceding maturity.
The reality of true maturation seems much too dreary. Since we crave our happy years, deep inside most of us lurks the unfinished business of teen angst, and therefore, we continue to try to resolve issues using substandard sets of problem-solving skills.
I know nobody will read this article, because I am not that popular a writer, however, I know that we now are at a place which calls for us to become better than we have thought we could be. We are now realizing that the problem with our culture is that we are not yet ready to resolve most of the important issues because to do so would mean we will have to decide upon a fixated point on the spectrum and then will have to deal with alienating many who themselves are keep sliding back and forth on it.
Since they can’t remain firm, we can’t.
And there it is in a nutshell.
In a way, we are still paying the price caused by the greedy kids from Wall Street, who took avarice to a whole new level — they are the ones who put us on the world stage in the mess of faking it and selling the world useless bundles of mortgage-backed securities. Their established point was so close to freedom that it left nothing of principle. Those were the mean kids in school who always took more than their fair share.
Our hugely dichotomous cultural heritage and roadmap may have led us astray at this stage of our nation, but it was the Wall Street kids who pinned us down and allowed other nations to buy the hell out of the United States. They sold us out, pure and simple, and nobody even bothers to remind us of this anymore.
We forget and move on because it appeases our need not to determine a point on the line. So, we have given away our principles just to remain in our terminal adolescence.
The Paradox:
If we never grow, things will just continually get worse.
As a culture, we wanted our children to have the best childhood, and that meant buying them things, keeping them happy, and even protecting them from their own urges. We wanted their childhood to last until they were thirty if we could help it. We never allowed them to fail on their own and so protecting them from their own truths, along with the truths of humanity and the world, became a moral imperative.
The most popular boys had to be macho athletes in order to live up to the standards of our sports heroes. All the most successful girls had to be everything to everyone at all times just to compete with the boys. These high standards left no room for the reality of who we really were, and so, as we grew, none of us accepted our own truths. Divorce rates skyrocketed and unhappiness prevailed, while drug makers became rich selling us anti-anxiety and anti-depressant medications.
We played the parts well enough — even when we were leading our nation. Now, we have high school on the main stage of our government. Yappy, belligerent, better-than-thou, mischievous, no teamwork, no reconciliation with the other groups, it is our national Grease on stage for all the world to see, and everyone is playing their parts oh so wonderfully well.
We threw away conventionality, and all principles as well.
What could have been done? Competition must be seen as the true endeavor it is in reality — one must succeed at the failures of all the others. Do we really need that? Being the best we can be should mean we take all others up along with us instead of trampling them to the ground. Sounds boring, but do we want moral aptitude, or do we want a few who excel at the expense of all others?
Teamwork and solving problems together is more important. Our government is a shining example of what happens when we strive to be on the top without principle and adulthood guiding our moves. Teamwork and solving problems together gets flushed down the toilet instead of being the highest level of morality as it should be.
Second, we do not need to keep our children in a mason jar, bottled up and protected from all around them. They become sexual with a full array of sexual feelings very early in their double digits, and yet we expect them to somehow navigate relationships on their own and in a vacuum until they are twenty-five.
We must accept that this is not the best way for them to grow. They are capable of learning and dealing with our truths and their own. They must navigate the clumsy terrain of learning about their choices, their bodies, and their need for love.
We must be willing to allow ourselves and our children the freedom needed to find fulfillment, whatever that might be. Moral outrage and judgmental attitudes from others will not suffice. Yes, we may and will fail. But when we allow for failure, we all will recover stronger and with much more wisdom than we would have had without it. This is how we learn to find a point on the spectrum to stand upon.
I have written so much about what is wrong with mainstream media in many of my other articles, and these lessons are as true now as they ever were. Media has got to stop harping on one cause after another until we are assaulted by an endless sea of messages meant to make us feel inferior since so much needs to be done according to their need to make money. They are there to investigate, report the truth, and not to bend to their donors’ whims who want them to politicize every single issue.
For the record, I was the much “too-nice” nerdy one, socially isolated from everyone in high school, because nobody wanted me except for my paranoid schizophrenic mom, whom I loved to pieces. Throughout my insane childhood, I was alone in caring for her, and when she left life much too early, I was left with a broken heart that has yet to mend.
The choice is ours to make. Other cultures do things much better than we do. We have to stop pretending we have it just right. We don’t. We have a long road ahead of us with many curves and potholes. The more we sway and go back and forth, the longer our growing pains will last. We need to define who we are.
We would have known this by now and would have gotten further along the road had we just stopped our moral ambiguity long enough to realize both sides may have it right. The middle ground means we want to raise principled adults, but to do so, we may need the liberal sides’ freedom to get there.
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