The Way Forward (Main Blog-please read first)

The Way Forward

The United States of America was founded on principals of freedom and the belief that everyone is created equal. Along with freedom, Americans have always had a yearning for peace. These ideals have been the backbone of our national identity but we have lost our way.

What makes America great is our ability to step back and question whether we have been true to ourselves and our values. Far from being unpatriotic, self-examination is a strength.
In a few substantial ways, America is better off. Women have been able to vote for almost a century. Civil rights legislation is slowly expanding the rights of minorities.

But is our way of life better now than in generations past?

My maternal grandfather was born in 1899 into a struggling working class family. When he was about sixteen, he dropped out of high school so that he could help his family out. When my parents met, my grandfather was on his way to becoming a successful business man. Without a high school diploma, my grandfather had educated himself and was living the American success story.

By the 1970s the message had begun to change. A high school diploma was the minimum requirement for earning a decent living and a college degree was becoming the new standard. Many of my peers were being told by their parents that it was a “dog-eat-dog world” rife with intense competition. Case in point: A childhood friend who loved playing a musical instrument told his parents that he might choose music for his livelihood and his parents promptly stopped his music lessons!

In contrast to these prevailing norms, my grandfather’s financial successful provided a little extra cushion, allowing me to ignore the messages my friends were getting. My parents also thought very highly of choosing the helping professions as a career.

Today, many people with college degrees are working as waitresses or driving cabs.

What have we settled for?

There used to be a promise of a better life. We were told that technology was going to make our lives easier and that a four-day work week was looming on the horizon. At that time, fathers really did work forty hours a week and mothers could usually afford to stay home and be with the children. People wanted nice things but there was less of an addiction to material possessions.

As competition heated up people were required to work more and more hours in companies whose bottom line was making the largest profit possible. Fewer companies seemed to care about their employees. This placed greater strain on families. The diminished time with families and the heightened stress increased the desire to escape. Divorce rates skyrocketed. The commercialism of our culture provided additional outlets for escape by encouraging us to buy more and buy often.

It is a human tendency to behave addictively when deprived. For some, technology has become a new “fix.” From Nintendo and X-box for our children to Blackberries and multimedia computers for ourselves, we began to measure our lives by the objects we possessed rather than by the quality of our relationships with each other. Technology tells us that the human race is progressing but the shadow side is evident when our children stay inside watching television rather than being outdoors on a beautiful day.

According to Penelope Trunk’s “Brazen Careerist” the American dream is beginning to shift from having more money to having more time. Generation X and Y especially seem to understand this while baby boomers still tend to work sixty hours a week,-- to earn the extra money,--to buy the things they think they need.

When we don’t have enough money we take out loans. As a psychotherapist working with average American families in middle class neighborhoods, I have witnessed my clients’ tendencies to purchase possessions they cannot afford by taking out loans that they cannot afford to pay back. Not surprisingly, this has made finances the number one problem that couples fight about.

When money is our most important value, we the people blindly accept that banks charge those with poorer credit ratings more for their loans! It is counterintuitive until one stops to realize that the lenders are only thinking about making a profit. These predator lenders have calculated that enough people will successfully pay off their loan at the higher rate. It doesn’t matter to them that more people will default.

Why has our government allowed lenders to discriminate by charging people with less money higher rates? If they are at greater risk than why should we make it even harder for them to pay off their loans?

Why do we allow this to happen?

As values and relationships have weakened, we have increasingly lost touch with what is really important. Some of us have given-up. Instead of looking forward to a better future, we feel fortunate that we are surviving.

We, the middle class. How lucky we are in a world where people are starving. In a country where some of us live on the streets and eat in a soup kitchen. What have we settled for? Do we really think that it cannot be better? Sometimes it seems as if we have stopped fighting for a better life. We have come to believe that this suffering is inevitable. Our confidence that we can make the world a better place has been stripped. We have lost our sense of empowerment.

Where have our values gone when we make the “Almighty dollar” more important than each other? What have we settled for when we only live for the moment and allow ourselves to further exploit the environment? Everyone knows that unrestrained capitalism is not the answer. This is why our government has built in safeguards, such as government intervention to stop monopolies from forming.

Government regulations that were meant to protect Americans have been dismantled and Republican ideology has been mainly responsible. Social programs have become equated with socialism and socialism has become a dirty word, equated with either communism or a population of lazy people who do not work for a living and get handouts while hard-working Americans suffer.

Religion can help us return to our values

What is even more ironic is that America is a religious nation. Judeo-Christian teachings tell us to offer a hand to people in need. Many religious organizations do help on a local level. Why then does the religious right support the Republican agenda?

Several evangelical leaders are beginning to ask the same question. Jim Wallis, author of “God’s Politics” (how the Right gets it Wrong and the Left does not Get It) states that “The real theological problem in America today is no longer the Religious Right but the nationalist religion of the Bush administration-one that confuses the identity of the nation with the church, and God’s purposes with the mission of American Empire (Sojourners Magazine 2003)

Amy Sullivan is an evangelical Christian. She is also a senior editor at Time Magazine and a liberal Democrat. She believes that many conservative Christian evangelicals are feeling burnt by the Republican party. By focusing on the hot topics of abortion and marriage between a man and a woman, Republicans were able to garner the votes of conservative Christians.

In 2001 David Kuo was appointed special assistant to President Bush and deputy director of faith-based and community Initiatives at the White House. He left in 2003 and published a book called “Tempting Faith: An Inside story of Political Seduction.” Mr. Kuo claims that the position he held under George Bush was used to garner political support. In an article appearing on www.beliefnet.com Kuo states that the money promised to help those in need barely materialized. In June 2001 these funds were stripped away to make room for the estate-tax repeal that overwhelmingly benefited the wealthy.

Where are our resources going?

A primary function of government is to protect its population from the greed of those who would use their money and power for personal gain. John McCain and Republicans in general have focused almost exclusively on protecting America from threats outside of our country. We have turned a blind eye to the social and economic forces at home that threaten us.

Economic growth has become more important than people’s lives. This is what is wrong with our nation. This myopic view has led to a perilous polarization, causing us to fixate almost exclusively on external threats, while virtually ignoring the threats to our nation from within its own borders.

Democrats tend to understand this better than Republicans and Barack Obama definitely understands this better than John McCain. Recent evidence for this was when John McCain blamed the greediness of specific individuals for the financial crisis we now face. But there will always be people who will game the system. This is part of human nature.

We are a very resourceful country but we have been bleeding these resources for too long and it beginning to show. It seems practically sacrilegious to say this but a major drain on our country’s resources is our Military. Please let me explain.

Before the market crashed, our economy was already massively in debt to the tune of more than ten trillion dollars. Where does the money go? Every month tax payers pay ten billion dollars to keep our solders in Iraq. Our military budget is 583 billion dollars a year! To put this in perspective, most Americans (including myself) are all for having the most powerful military in the world but our military spending is equal to the military budgets of every other country combined! Russia’s military budget at 50 billion dollars is less than one-tenth of what we spend.

A strong military is important and this understanding crosses political lines. But our massive outlays are diverting needed resources from projects at home which require urgent attention. What could we have done with just a fraction of this money if it were spent it on the American people?! Republicans refer to this money as the wasted social programs of democrats. Is education for our children a waste of money? Is an improved infrastructure, healthcare for all and programs to benefit the environment a waste of money?

Our broken health care system

Let’s take a quick look at our health care system as compared with other countries. The United States is the only industrialized nation in the world that does not have guaranteed access to health care for all its citizens. This has led us to the 23rd highest infant mortality rate in the world. We also rank 20th in life expectancy for women and 21st for men, down from the best life expectancy for men and women in 1945. Moreover, the United States spends 40 percent more per capita on health care than any other industrialized country with universal health care (Statistics from The Connecticut Coalition for Universal Health Care).

The only time in recent history that we had a budget surplus were the last seven years under President Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton tried his best to push for a better quality of life for Americans but was thwarted by a Republican congress for most of his presidency. In spite of worries by the Right that three months of guaranteed unpaid medical leave would be bad for the economy, this act was signed into law in 1993.

The Change we need now

The national debt was one-trillion in 1980 when President Ronald Reagan talked about the importance of lowering it. He also popularized “trickle-down” economics. The trickle-down hypothesis states that as companies made more money and the rich became richer, the profits would trickle down to the middle and working class. Instead, the rich became richer and the middle class could no longer afford many things that were previously within its reach.

This must change. Americans have been told by the political right that to question is unpatriotic because it fosters negativity. Yet, isn’t it worse to ignore a bleeding wound than to recognize its existence and attend to it? I think that most Americans have either known directly or had a gut sense that something has been wrong for a long time. John McCain did not want Americans to know this which is why he said our economy was stable when our current fiscal crisis began. When this placation of Americans was no longer working (for obvious reasons) John McCain lied to us by saying that he was actually talking about the American worker. To this we say: We are not as naive as you think. We are strong enough to face the truth and go about fixing it.


Barack Obama has clearly demonstrated that he has better judgement and a more profound understanding of people than John McCain. He realizes that we are all capable of kind and selfish acts. He recognizes that the potential for altruism and the tendency of some of us to behave selfishly, without regard for others is not always separated by country but by the character of individuals. He knows the importance of bringing Americans together. And he knows how to protect us from harm while simultaneously working toward regaining our respect in the world.