It’s a question I often hear from my friends in Asia or Europe, one that obviously has accosted famous journalist-turned-author Thomas Friedman (The World is Flat) with even greater frequency: “What’s up with you guys?” They really can’t believe that the United States, once the bastion of economic efficiency and fully operational democratic government seems to have been reduced to a simpering mass of ineffective protoplasm, unable to move or even get out of its own way. Friedman, spending time in the Asian tiger, city-state, Singapore, had some recent thoughts about the recent self-destructive trend Washington.
“What we built and what we dreamt were, to many, the definition of the future. Well, today, to many people, we look like the definition of a drunken driver — like a lifelong mentor who has gone on a binge and is no longer predictable. And, as for defining the future, the country that showed the world how to pull together to put a man on the moon and defeat Nazism and Communism, today broadcasts a politics dominated by three phrases: ‘You can’t do that,’ ‘It’s off the table’ and ‘The president didn’t know.’ A Singaporean official who has been going to America for decades expressed shock to me at being in Washington during the government shutdown and how old and emotionally depressed the city felt…
“In talking to Asian college students, teachers, diplomats and businesspeople, here is how I’d distill what was on their minds: ‘Are you really going to shut down your government again? Like, who does that? And, by the way, don’t think that doesn’t affect my business over here, because I’m holding a lot of dollars and I don’t know what their value is going to be. Also, how could the people who gave us Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, I.B.M., H.P. and Google not be able to build a workable health care website? I know it had five million users, but there are 48 million Indonesians on Facebook!’
“Worse, whenever you’d visit China or Singapore, it was always the people there who used to be on the defensive when discussing democracy. Now, as an American, you’re the one who wants to steer away from that subject. After all, how much should we be bragging about a system where it takes $20 million to be elected to the Senate; or where a majority of our members of Congress choose their voters through gerrymandering rather than voters choosing them; or where voting rights laws are being weakened; or where lawmakers spend most of their free time raising money, not studying issues; or where our Congress has become a forum for legalized bribery; or where we just had a minority of a minority threaten to undermine America’s credit rating if we didn’t overturn an enacted law on health care; or where we can’t pass even the most common sense gun law banning assault weapons after the mass murder of schoolchildren?” Friedman writing for the November 2nd New York Times.
It’s really hard to explain to Japanese, Russians, Canadians, Singaporeans, French, Germans, Swiss, Scandinavians, Austrians, Belgians, Dutch, etc., etc., etc. how there are actually politicians in the United States who are telling their constituents that Obamacare, a watered down version of various forms of their own and functional universal healthcare systems, will destroy the United States. They love their healthcare systems, which are usually far more socialized than anything remotely in our program, and wonder how Americans can be so stupid to ignore the fact of so many functioning plans in economically successful countries around the world.
Even China is working on a system for their own country, so when the same American crazies tell the world that banning assault weapons with oversized magazines, generating meaningful statistics about gun-related homicides and mandating background checks for private weapons sales will destroy our basic rights, right after one more serial killing or gun-driven assault, they wonder what brain worm has infected so many people.
That we have a thoroughly undemocratic House of Representatives, that rich people can spend their money to support any candidate or platform they wish with few restraints, that we seem to have a secret police (like the NSA and all the government agencies that feed on its information), much like the former regimes in Eastern Europe or the current regime in North Korea, and that pretty much spies on anyone they wish, that there is a small but uber-powerful extremist group in our own Congress that is hell-bent on shutting down the government (again!), opposing legislation and appointees simply because these were proposed by the President, and letting the nation default on its debts) … well, they seem to think that the United States is no long a stable or reliable nation or one worthy of investing in.
They certainly think that a nation where the middle class is shrinking, where 1% of the population now owns 42% of the wealth, where over 90% of income gains since the 2008 crash have been enjoyed by only the top 10%, where the number of hard patents is falling, where educational standards are dropping even as a minority presses for teaching creationism as a priority over improving math skills is more a polarized plutocracy than a functioning democracy.
It’s not like this is isolated grumbling; it’s become more like a global consensus. And if you think “so what,” understand that a weakened dollar – where faith in our currency is a reflection of faith in our nation (we aren’t exactly backing the dollar with gold anymore!) – will make commodities more expensive, imports exorbitant, national debt more costly and will generally reduce the power and influence of the United States just about everywhere!
I’m Peter Dekom, and by sitting back and not raising holy hell with your elected representatives, yelling and screaming all the way, you just may be part of the problem!
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