It does feel as if humanity is on a losing streak in America lately. America’s great national vice — our weakness for self-congratulation & self-praise — has combined with long prosperity to produce a toxic decadence. <thread>
2. Americans may have forgotten one of the very first things the then-new administration did upon taking office was to give a good hard kick to Syrian war refugees, people as cruelly oppressed as any in the world. They were all terrorists, we were told, & had to be kept out.
3. The American public accepted that. The same public has barely noticed how the US military is at this moment facilitating a war for the President’s Saudi and Gulf Arab friends in Yemen, a war that threatens not thousands but millions of people with cholera & famine.
4. America loses thousands of people every year to gun violence; we accept it, rather than treating it as an emergency requiring action. America loses even more people to drug overdoses — we have for years — and we don’t treat that as an emergency either.
5. And then there is the family separation. You won’t find white families subjected to this, I don’t think, & not just because our southern border is with Mexico. A large part of the public, and a partisan majority in Congress, has accepted a White America immigration policy,
6.... ...and is willing to tolerate outrages even against small children to sustain it. These are all of them shameful things, and millions of Americans voted for them with eyes open while wrapping themselves in the flag & telling one another how exceptional they were.
7. They are still doing it. I wonder if it should feel as strange to me as it does that what resonated most about Donald Trump for millions of Americans were his ceaseless demands for praise and extravagant, empty claims of intelligence, foresight, philanthropy, and much more.
8. I tend to look down on and distrust people who praise themselves, or who make claims for themselves they can't back up. I regard such conduct as vice. But it is a vice rather prominent in our national story. Two years ago many embraced its personification in Donald Trump.
9. Self-praise and self-congratulation are the antithesis of responsibility, the first necessary condition for any public servant to be worth anything, and one that cannot be absent from too many citizens if freedom and order are to endure.
10. Responsibility means not looking away from the human consequences of government policy. It means understanding the truth that inaction is a choice with human consequences. It is a way of thinking, not just a response to a crisis one sees on television.
11. We are losing time in America today: precious time, time we won't get back. While many Americans congratulate themselves on the country they inherited, while they celebrate a President who validates all their petty resentments and grievances, we are losing time to adapt...
12...American democracy and society to demographic reality: more older white Americans, more younger non-white Americans from many cultures. We are losing time to stop the rot in America's position in the world, the essential support for a world order...
13... that makes peace and prosperity possible for billions of people around the globe. And we are losing time to prevent changes in the climate of the planet great enough to put hundreds of millions of lives at risk and threaten the structure of human civilization itself.
14. Inaction is a choice; responsibility demands we recognize its human consequences. America is in a moral depression today that’s been years in the making. It's not a matter of atmospherics, of "polarization," or of hand-wringing about why we can't all get along.
15. Today's family separation crisis ought to give us a clearer picture. Our moral depression is about it being more urgent to praise ourselves for how humane we are than to actually be humane. It's about thinking of our future as something that will just happen someday...
16...rather than as something we are responsible for building. Our moral depression is about shirking the responsibilities of freedom, turning away from the work required to maintain a just society. We Americans have a limited time to recover ourselves. It's running out.[end]
@threadreaderapp please unroll.
