Here in my opinion is the central problem. True democracy will inevitably lead to a fracturing of society unless there are countervailing forces that maintain an underlying unity. In the past these unifying influences included a limited number of news and TV outlets (most Americans shared the common experience of Walter Cronkite, Ed Sullivan, and the middle class American dream embodied by Donna Reed), public schools, the draft, and âmelting potâ immigration.
I am old enough to have lived this first hand and there was a time when I thought this is how it always was. As it turns out the US (and presumably many other societies) have gone through many eras where life and societal norms and influences were vastly different. And we survived.
Before the broadcast era every city had dozens of newspapers, many with labels like the Manhattan Democrat or the Arkansas Republican. They made no pretense of being âfair and balancedâ, you knew exactly where they stood from the masthead on down. Talk about news silos! It may be that television is a more potent force, that the internet has made the silos even narrower, but the concept is/was the same.
Believe it or not there was a time when social class and division were far greater than today: in the Gilded Age you were either âof moneyâ or you were not, and that was that. We made it past patriarchy and racist ideologies, not entirely but pretty well. And it was not so long ago that religion played a far more central role in American life and politics, or if you prefer it was fairly long ago that church was central, including a time when many states had actual state religions, and we seem to have come through both of those eras OK.
Everyone remembers the 50âs, Bull Connorsâ fire hoses, and Martin Luther Kingâs marches for equality, I suspect more than half of the readers here remember the 60âs assassinations of MLK and Bobby Kennedy, yes actual gun deaths of major political leaders. Within a few years there were anti-war riots in the street, protestors getting their heads bashed in by construction workers, buildings exploding via home-made bombs, and then race riots burning down metropolitan areas across the country. And we survived.
Heck, somewhere in our history we had a costly Civil War over slavery where 600,000 people died over an issue thatâs been debated since Ancient Rome and beyond.
I say this not to say âOh donât worry about it, weâve had worseâ even though we have. History can turn on a dime. The colonies were reliably British in 1765 and at war with the Mother country a decade later. But - and hereâs the punch line - we have been through worse and we have survived and we have thrived. Heck, we made it through Disco with barely a scratch.
âUnityâ in the country can take many forms. I recall the patriotic fervor after 9/11, I can only imagine what it was like after Pearl Harbor. I remember the conformity of the âFather Knows Bestâ era and I can imagine there have been many others, perhaps when we âall pulled togetherâ in the Depression and other times over the past 250 years.
I choose to be optimistic about our current troubles not because I have any insight into the future but because being pessimistic would only give me an ulcer and ultimately I am powerless to do anything about it all anyway. Thereâs that song, an earworm if there ever was one, âDonât Worry, Be Happy.â Good advice. Not perfect, of course, but then what is?
Unity Schmunity. Let freedom ring. Hopefully there will be better days ahead.