We Are The Greatest. But Can It Last?
This isn't about "America, love it or leave it." But in some ways, change it.
I love America. I’ve always seen it as the greatest nation on earth, and having covered news in dozens of countries where liberties are limited and life is cheap, I think I appreciate that as much as anyone.
But can it continue to be the greatest? When you step away and ask that question, the answer isn’t always so clear.
Here’s Exhibit A: Describing the mass shooting Sunday in Florida, the director of the Miami-Dade Police Department said that three men “stepped out of the vehicle with assault rifles and handguns and started firing indiscriminately into the crowd.”
Just stop and think about that for a moment. They simply got out of their car and opened fire. Didn’t care who they hit. Didn’t care who they killed.
Not that it matters whether they cared or not. Another gunman, who four days earlier shot up the San Jose transportation depot where he worked, apparently targeted the nine specific co-workers he killed as he spared others.
And the world is watching.
So ask yourself, if you didn’t already live here in the United States of America, would you want to now? Especially if you learned that Sunday’s massacre was but one of 243 mass shootings this year so far; a mass shooting means four or more victims shot at the same place, at the same time. It was one of 65 in the month of May alone. The numbers are unnerving: in 2021 to date, a total of 1,255 people were shot in these slaughters. 283 are dead. All told, the FBI reports murders in America for the first three months of the year are up by 18%. The vast majority were with guns.
Is this where you’d want to live?
And we’re not even halfway into the year, with startling statistics as an ominous sign of what’s coming. Just a few weeks ago, the federal government did a record 1.2 million background checks for citizens who wanted to buy guns. That’s 1.2 million new guns in a single week. Some were buying them for the first time. Some were adding to their arsenals. Altogether, estimates put the number of guns in circulation as high as 400 million. And counting. What’s more, police departments report that they are seeing automatics and semi-automatics more powerful than before, with bigger magazines to carry more ammo.
And now, after Texas last week joined a growing list, you can carry a concealed handgun— with no permit, no training, no education at all— in 20 states.
What is this world coming to?!?
For people in societies tormented by violence and oppression, maybe the answer to the question about living here would still be yes. By comparison to what they’ve suffered, maybe life here still sounds sweet. But for too many of us, it sometimes seems not so much sweet as insane.
And the world’s not just watching our insatiable attachment to guns. It’s also watching our inexplicable response to Covid.
Sure, between former President Trump’s Operation Warp Speed to produce vaccines and President Biden’s warp speed program to get them into Americans’ arms, we are now ahead of almost all the world. But still, ever since the pandemic started, too many Americans haven’t worn masks, haven’t gotten tested, haven't socially-distanced. They say they have the right to refuse, as if the rest of us don’t have the right to survive.
The pandemic as a political football led to some of the world’s highest rates of transmission and death, and led to this despairing question by New York Times columnist David Brooks about solidarity and sacrifice for the common good: “Could today’s version of America have been able to win World War II? It hardly seems possible.”
If the world is watching us, what it sees— to poach from Brooks— is a nation of people in which “it’s not that they are rebuking their responsibilities as citizens; it apparently never occurs to them that they might have any.”
Hardly Ronald Reagan’s “shining city on the hill.”
Then there’s the issue of America’s very bedrock, democracy. Put yourself in the shoes of some citizen watching us from overseas. Especially one who always has looked to us as a peerless exemplar of what we preach. Ask yourself what you would think today when you see states— most states— assaulting that bedrock, pursuing laws to make it harder to vote, not easier. If their manipulations to rig our elections last, how can we decry rigged elections anywhere else?
To say nothing of Donald Trump’s debunked and delusional lie about the integrity and outcome of our elections. And all while the world watches. His lie is hard enough to fathom, but the millions of Americans who buy into it? That’s even harder. Especially the crazies convinced by QAnon’s preposterous proposition that pedophiles worshipping Satan control the workings of government. Polling shows that upwards of 15% of Americans believe this. Chew on that for a moment: 15 out of every hundred people you see— that’s more than one out of every seven— actually accept such dangerous drivel.
And for those of us who don’t, it gets scarier. In one new poll, 15 out of a hundred also agree that “American patriots may have to resort to violence” to correct the country’s course. (And of those, almost half say they believe “the COVID-19 vaccine contains a surveillance microchip that is the sign of the beast in biblical prophecy.”)
The world is watching. This doesn’t encourage it to look to us for shelter. Let alone for wisdom. Let alone for leadership.
What the world sees is a nation that requires more hours of training, on average, for its barbers than for its police, according to the Institute for Criminal Justice Training Reform. What it sees is a nation that stands alone amongst its Western allies in calling healthcare a privilege rather than a universal right. What it sees is a nation that won’t draw the line on gun ownership anywhere below the likes of an AK-47. Message to the gun lobby: reform doesn’t mean controlling how many people own guns. It means controlling how many people die from guns.
But try telling that to the lobby, and the millions who uncritically support it.
Look, like I said at the top, I love America. But if we don’t find a way to reverse our course, can we keep calling this the greatest nation on earth? And even if we do, will the world believe it? Will the world respect it? That’s what’s at stake. That’s what’s in jeopardy.
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For almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks, a political columnist for The Denver Post, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies at home and international crises around the globe. He won three Emmys, and the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists. This essay also is published today— with images— on a website he co-founded, BoomerCafe.com.
Fifteen years ago, I worked as a tech writer for an Israeli startup with a satellite office in San Francisco. After the Stage Club bombing in Tel Aviv in 2005 that killed five and wounded 50, the investors insisted all Israeli employees move to California to get away from the conflict and violence in the Middle East. That didn't sit well with the co-founder's wife, who insisted that she was afraid to live in San Francisco. It's just not safe there, she said. Better the devil you know than the devil you don't?
Your article today confirmed my very thoughts for the past few years. Our country has hung onto the title of "greatest country in the world" a little too long, I think. I feel that those living outside of the U.S. realize that our title is no longer deserved. Just look around, as you have so clearly articulated.
I have been very concerned for the past several years. And, I feel somewhat grateful to now be 80 years of age. The happenings in the U.S. are just out of control, and I feel that Trump really initiated much of it. As you mentioned, how can so many people believe his rants and his lies? THAT is the real mystery to me. How long will this insanity continue? At 80, I know that my years of witnessing all of this are limited. But what about all of the generations which will follow us? What we are leaving them is shameful. And, instead of shrinking these ideas and movements, they are growing.
Thank you for your very wise observations, as usual, Greg.
Bruce
May God bless American, now more than ever before!