Opinion

We Are Failing Us

A dismal day in August sums up the state of the nation.

August 15, 2021. A little over a century ago, the middle days of August saw a collective failure of will that propelled the crumbling empires of Europe into the first world war. Now the grim wheel of history has turned again. Beware the Ides of August.

The events of that earlier August, circa 1914, led eventually to what’s been called The American Century. Now we find ourselves at the other end of that long century, feeling like we’re in an elevator and the cable just snapped.

My August 15th is instructive. It began with the gut-rending headlines out of Afghanistan. I processed nothing as I read about about the utter collapse of the nation we’d spent 20 years fighting alongside. I just read, filled with sadness and shame the way silence occupies a tomb.

Then came the stories about the 7.2 magnitude earthquake off the coast of Haiti. These are good people. They practically live in our neighborhood. It shouldn’t keep happening to them.

It shouldn’t all be happening at once.

It was Sunday. I thought to find some comfort in going to mass. But our “summer of freedom” from the global pandemic didn’t make it past July. The hyper virulent Delta variant arrived and the nation’s public health defenses were as porous as the Afghan army’s perimeter around Kabul. For me at least, church is back on-line.

As if to emphasize the point, the first reading on this particular Sunday was from the Book of Revelation. “Then another sign appeared in heaven: an enormous red dragon with seven heads and ten horns and seven crowns on its heads. Its tail swept a third of the stars out of the sky and flung them to the earth.”

You see where this small essay is heading. It’s not just about the catastrophe in Afghanistan.

In the afternoon I attended a gathering for a friend who’s health is failing. He’s one of the top chefs in the city. His latest restaurant put on the event to celebrate his remarkable life at a time he would still be able to attend. When he greeted me, he shook his head at the thought we all had to be wearing masks again — we had every opportunity to be moving past that by now.

I ended the day having a drink with a young doctor. He told me how he worries about his unvaccinated patients. Some already waiting out their lives attached to ventilators. One, a drug addict, said he was refusing the vaccine because he worried about what might be in it, despite having no problem with meth, bought on a street corner after being made in a meth lab in some random backyard shed or basement.

It’s said you have to hit bottom before you can start the climb back toward the light. Maybe August 15 was the bottom for America. I say that with some guarded optimism.

The more thoughtful pundits and politicians are already asking what can be learned from our recent grab bag of failings. I’d suggest there are two lessons that matter.

One is the lesson we always fail to learn from our wars. You can be as wise or strategic or all-powerful as you want at the start of a war. But you’ll only have bad options when it comes time to end one.

The other is, all those emotions we felt reading the news on the morning of August 15, the shame, the fear, the helplessness, that’s what America First feels like when it's put into practice instead of just shouted out at a political rally. America is only a superpower as long as we accept the obligations that come with being one.

Perhaps the more important question — who do we blame for all of this. As the New York Times editorial board put it, “Within hours of the fall of Kabul, the knives were already out.”

The worst sorts in our public life are all busy using their Twitter accounts and cable news show appearances to point outraged fingers. I would love to hear one politician tell us all to go home and take a good look in the mirror. Have a hard conversation with the person you see staring back.

That’s where the fault lies. That’s where the answers begin.

The fights ahead of us get harder, not easier. The old geopolitical tectonic plates are shifting. The novel coronavirus remains among us and we have been schooled in its brutally relentless nature. The planet is turning into a convection oven. These are problems that span humanity.

We have an existential need to be better to one another. All the one anothers. Across borders. Across ideologies.

This is on us. All of us. Time to become unfailing in our commitment to start working together.