2020: Year of the Mirror
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ncle Sam never wanted this day to come. He sees extra pounds around the middle. The thinning spot on top of his head. The wrinkles now permanently etched around his eyes.
This year, Sam is all of us. Unavoidably, we will see our true reflection revealed by a single election. There will be no escape from what we’ve become.
Like it or not, 2020 is our year of the mirror.
t’s reassuring to think, “hey, America has survived worse than this! We’ll be OK. If we could get through the Civil War…Pearl Harbor…the disco era--we can get through this…”
It’s natural to believe that America will endure. But there’s really nothing natural about us. It’s been 10,000 years since man began farming…and created property rights and early governments to protect that property. America’s form of democracy didn’t authorize the votes of all citizens until passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1964. If you consider those 10,000 years of social history as a single calendar year, these last 56 of universal voting constitute just two hours in a single day. We remain a mere experiment.
And today, our noble experiment is being contaminated:
Fact or Belief: Underlying all the corrosive moves authored by the White House is the introduction of pure falsehood. The puppet king urges his subjects to ignore what is demonstrably true, to bathe in his own perversions of reality. An entire political party, and no small number of religious leaders and business titans, carry baggage for him. Fact is obscured, and truth wobbles.
Bill of Rights: Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. All men created equal. Freedom of speech, the press, and the privacy of our homes. We know all these vows by heart; but have these words now become relics? Are we willing to bargain them away? Are we really thinking all this through?
Empathy: It seems empathy is now out of fashion. Some babies are grabbed from their parents’ arms at the border. Across America, in less than 20 years, nine thousand kids under 20 have died from prescription and illegal drug overdoses—600 of them under the age of five. Suicides among teens jumped almost 50% from 2000 to 2017. Adults can disagree on many things, but certainly—together--we still care about all kids. Don’t we?
lexander Hamilton said man, “…is destined to be ruled by accident and force.”
What if our democratic experiment was just an accident of history? What if this administration proves to be an unstoppable force…and we, a movable object?
There is a long road of apprehension, angst and anger coming in the months until November.
But on the fourth day of that month, we will have our answer.
We will look in the mirror that day…and see what we’ve become.
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