Make America Great for the FIRST Time

I’m done hearing and seeing delusional, half-baked MAGA crap! In order to make something great again, it needed to actually be great at some point so you can get back to that theoretical imaginary greatness. America is big. America is powerful. America has done incredible things. America has some amazing talent. America has some amazing land and beaches (for now). Americans work hard and build some great things.

Yes, things about America ARE great and have never stopped being great so we don’t really need to “get back to those.” Things like the ideals of divided government, checks and balances and basic rights are great. Liberty and Justice for all are great concepts. National Parks are great. Many of our inventions are great. But none of those things ARE America, just parts of it. So let’s get real and look at the parts that aren’t so great and never were. The sum total of all the parts IS America and it gets a C+ grade at best.

Not So Great

The list of things that are not great both now and in the past is very long. Here are just a few:

1. Slavery: 300+ years of capturing and brutally trading humans into bondage so you can get rich on free labor is not a mark of greatness, it’s a scar of shame on the very foundations of this nation. African Americans are still suffering the consequences of this dark part of our original history.
2. Treatment of Natives: The original inhabitants of this land had been here for thousands of years and Europeans basically came over and just took their land by force. They didn’t even have a concept of land ownership. After all, who can really own the Earth? Our barbarity toward the original peoples is nearly genocidal and allowing them to operate casinos is not exactly the the consolation prize their anscestors were looking for.
3. White male hegemony: Women, let alone anyone of color were not even considered part of We The People in the first version of the US. To this day, women have to fight for every right and people of color remain second class citizens as systemic racism permeates nearly every aspect of society. Look at today’s Senate, by far mostly white men, hardly representative of the actual population which is half women and has a huge minority that’s becoming a majority soon. Now with the SCOTUS striking down Roe, women have been made powerless to control their own reproductive destinies and must complete all pregnancies to full term in nearly half of our states.
4. Greed: American capitalism has achieved amazing large scale things. However, it has been focused solely on the bottom line of financial profits and so is often propelled by greed for more profits at any cost. Things like price fixing, price gouging, planned obsolescence and outsourcing for dirt cheap labor and lack of worker benefits have plagued us. Add to that willful destruction of the environment, toxic waste dumps and known carcinogens in our products and we see that greed is NOT good.
5. Uglification: Look around any city or suburb and you will see blaring ugliness polluting our eyes. Europeans and Asians and others seem to take more pride in the appearances of things from signage to architecture. America just keeps making it uglier by the year with wires everywhere, ugly buildings and signs and billboards.
6. Nationalism: Being patriotic is fine up to a point. But when you start saying things like America First and demonize every other culture on Earth, some of which have been around thousands of years longer than us, you have mental problems. When a flag or an anthem is more important that the ideals for which they stand, you have lost your way. National pride is earned with each generation, not resting on the laurels of past glory you didn’t create or have nothing to do with.
7. Poor education: We have great universities but more often than not our students coming out of high school are far behind students in other counties. If we did go back to a time when we ranked better, you would find huge disparities between the education afforded to minorities or poor people. We can do better on the fundamentals. Our students are less and less prepared as the world progresses into the future. Less reading, less historical knowledge and a severe lack of critical think skills is plaguing us.
8. Racism: You’re going to have to do a lot of mental judo to find a time when America was not plagued with racism. Sure, if you were born white you might not care or notice as much but people of color have to work harder to succeed in almost any endeavor from getting loans to getting jobs. We don’t need Critical Race Theory to prove this has been with us all along. We have tens of millions of witnesses and lynchings were common in the past. That’s pretty racist if you ask me.
9. Warring: Especially post WW2, America has entered into some very questionable optional, non-defensive wars at great expense. In fact a gigantic portion of our combined resources goes into feeding the Military Industrial Complex. Our spending on weapons and military FAR exceeds any other country and many large countries combined. That’s not so great.
10. Pollution: Our ability to sully the land, water and air knows no bounds. As stewards of our environment we are terrible and each generation is handed a more degraded world to the point of near catastrophe. We continue to drive around in large, gas-guzzling SUV’s even as the West is literally burning down so our ability to control pollution is almost nil. Add to that a SCOTUS that strikes down any reasonable controls on CO2 emissions and you have a formula for Cosmic Ungreatness.
11. Voting weirdness: America has always had a voting problem. Our system is built to more easily let a relative few control how, when, where and even whether we can vote. Each state employs its own system so we deal with a crazy quilt of ways to vote, ways to count votes and accessibility to the ballot. Not very democratic. The result is a low quality Congress on State and National levels and Misrepresentation of the Will of the People. If the SCOTUS allows states the legal cover to gerrymander, then the minority could create an election lock scenario, blocking the majority from even trying to do things that are truly essential and desired by The People.
12. Senate Imbalance: As much as it may have seemed like a tip of the hat to fairness when it was first conceived, we have now reached a point where empty land has significantly more relative power than areas teeming with population. Since each state get 2 Senators regardless of population or size we have a situation where California and New York have far less Senatorial power than Idaho, Montana, the Dakotas, Wyoming, Utah, Kansas and Nebraska for example. This is called minority rule and the Senate has way too much influence over our future for this to be an acceptable way to govern a superpower. If the Senate had less power, it wouldn’t be such an issue but they basically have easy veto power over the House which is significantly more Democratic and Representative.
13. Electoral College: This relic builds on the unfairness of the Senate but for some reason only applies to Presidential elections. Every single other elected official in the US from local to state to national, must win the popular vote. But for some reason, we made it so the most powerful position on Earth can be elected having lost the popular vote. Recently, this has led to two disastrous Presidencies, GW Bush and DJ Trump. It’s awful and an embarrassment to the nation. And it’s almost impossible to get rid of because small states don’t want to give up one iota of power.
14. The Filibuster: This optional senate rule multiplies the power of the Senate for the minority to lord over the majority by arbitrarily requiring a super-majority to pass almost any significant or normal legislation such as common sense gun controls. You can tell how arbitrary it is by how the rule can be changed by a senate majority at any time to do away with the filibuster for example to verify Supreme Court picks. This is a terrible anti-democratic rule.
15. Injustice: The rich and powerful seem to have different justice system than the rest of us. They can buy the best lawyers or gum up the system with endless lawsuits. In the mean time, the crime of driving while black can get you killed. Our Prison Industrial Complex has become a money maker on the backs of over-incarcerated poor people.
16. Happiness: We don’t rank very high when it comes to the Happiness Index. In fact we have major mental health issues with depression, anxiety, substance abuse and addiction that keep our scores low. Not impressed. Other places like Denmark score much higher. We can do better.
17. Standard of living: The American Dream was never that great. A house in the burbs, mowing lawns, two cars in the driveway, etc. But even that simplistic concept is slipping out of grasp of many young people today and there is no going back to a time where it’s all Great Again. The Earth simply can’t handle everybody and their monkey living that way. The standard continues to dip and more folks are slipping into poverty and debt.
18. Violence: We are a gun-crazed nation and we pay dearly for that in the form of endless mass shootings, suicides and common thuggery. We glorify violence in our movies and music and even our cartoons. Our murder rates are near the top of the entire world. People actually enjoy peace so its weird we have so little of it.

Fairly Great

It’s only fair to mention the things we got right or do/did spectacularly well:

1. The Constitution: While it’s never been perfect, it was flexible enough to be amended and modified over the centuries and if only our leadership would adhere to its principles (and their oaths) this amazing document would live up to its true potential.
2. Music: We’ve invented so many genres of music that the world enjoys and is enriched by, be it blues, jazz, rock, R & B, bluegrass, punk, fusion, hip hop, pop and more. The talent and creativity of our musicians knows no bounds.
3. Movies and Television: Besides inventing most of the techniques used, our writers, composers and directors are unmatched in output of quality films and television shows. These are some of our most important exports around the world and creates a common bond between far away cultures.
4. Inventions: This is one area we kick ass in. Ever since Ben Franklin invented the glass harmonica we’ve been patenting everything from furnaces to phones to computer chips to air conditioners to electric guitars to mRNA vaccines. Our software is incredible too! We seem to be an inventive culture. American inventions are in wide use around the world.
5. Military: Yes we spend ungodly amounts on this but at the end of the day our military is populated with honorable, disciplined and well-trained soldiers and officers who uphold the Constitution and are very unlikely to participate in some autocratic plan to overtake the government and wield our six branches of military against the People. We also have, due to our wealth and inventiveness, some very scary weapons that mostly keep us safe. It’s also cool that we don’t do big military parades
6. Universities: Our schools are sought out by students from around the world and there is nothing you can’t learn at them. You want to be a brain surgeon? No problem. You want to learn how to create a search engine or build the green cities of the future? We’ve got you covered although the costs are now out of control so we do need to go back to a time when it was more affordable.
7. Our Land: This is possibly the greatest thing about our nation and we didn’t even make it, we took it! From the majestic mountains to the Grand Canyon and Yellowstone to the amazing large coasts secured between two great oceans we have it all. North America is a beautiful ancient continent and we are lucky to have a large portion of it as our home.

The Potential for True Greatness

Taken all together, we’ve never quite put the full “Greatness” package together. Too many have suffered or been left out of the picture. It’s not great if it’s only great for a select few. It’s not great if the environment is continuously degrading. It’s not great if people are unhappy or don’t have an equal opportunity. It’s not great if all you see are eyesores. It’s not great if people are having trouble voting in the numbers that represent the population properly.

Nevertheless, our GOAL should be to perfect the Union, to make US Great! Our goal should be to create equality under the law, a clean environment and a sustainable economy not based on military might alone. If we take the best of America and build on that, over many decades, THEN we could be truly great for the first time ever. We need to address all of our very deep problems, face them head on, one at a time and work hard to fix each and every issue. When we are truly great, any person on Earth will recognize it and we will actually be the fabled shining city on the hill they aspire to. We need to set our goals higher to be Great. For our sake and for the world, we need to get an A+.