Of Cabbages and Kings

Underneath all the personal insults, insinuations of corruption, foreign shenanigans, and reality show antics of this election cycle, the fundamental narrative of this sad little circus has been "Who are we as a people, and where do we go from here?" Donald Trump bellows that he'll Make America Great Again, promising a return to our glorious, mythical past where we enacted our will without restraint or consequence.  Hillary Clinton says that sure, things are bad now, but they aren't that bad really, and if we all just band together, we'll find the way forward that maintains just how awesome we are.  At the heart of both of these platitudes is the idea of an America that represented the peak of human civilization, the country that took all the ideologies and failures of all the previous world superpowers and condensed them into their purest, most complete form.  This, to me, is bullshit, mainly because it actively ignores the scale of our problems and instead focuses on giving people a false sense of security about how great the country is.  So here, I'm going to try and break down some fucked up about us so we can at least be honest with ourselves, if nothing else.

The first thing we'll look at is our military, and its capabilities.  Now, the military is the most sacred institution in America; anyone who doesn't break out raging Ron Jeremy patriotism boners is an automatic pariah in pretty much every social situation.  Which must be nice for the military, since if you actually took a look at it, you'd realize that it really hasn't accomplished much of anything since, oh, the 1940's.  World War II was really the last time the armed forces went out and defeated an enemy who had parity in size, supplies, and weapons capability.  After that, we have a draw in the Korean War against the North Koreans and China, a loss in Vietnam against an under-equipped and much smaller force, and petty school yard actions in Panama, Grenada, and the Gulf War, actions against  enemies so pathetic I bet most of you don't remember or even know about the Latin America adventures. In our lifetime, we have the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, which, sure, kicked out tyrannical governments, at least, until the Taliban pretty much waltzed back into Afghanistan because we were too busy trying to suppress a civil war in Iraq.  These days, the armed forces are used for counter-insurgency stuff, fighting terrorist off-shoots wherever they spring up.  They do this so much, in fact, that the Pentagon has had to institute training programs that re-teaches soldiers how to fight against actual opposing armies, since they'd sort of forgotten how to do so.  Which is bad, because, that's kinda the point of having an army.

But the problem runs deeper than that.  Because when your main strategy is to basically run around and blow shit up wherever enemies pop up, your're not really in control of the situation.  Instead, you're constantly reacting, constantly on the defensive, and instead of implementing or even formulating a plan that stops these groups from even starting, the only hope is that maybe you'll have to use fewer bombs and bullets to kill off the next group.  It is impossible to win with this line of thinking since it implicitly assumes that victory isn't an achievable goal.  So if the day comes where we actually do have a war with another nation-state and a comparable army, we'll be asking an army where no one in living memory has actually done that or actually figured out what the end of a war looks like or how to achieve it.  Lovely.

To be clear, none of those things are the soldiers fault.  All of these things are political and leadership failures who plot the direction soldiers have no choice but to follow.  They aren't off the hook, though since these failures aren't an accident, they're pretty much by design.  The switch from a conscription army to a volunteer one in the aftermath of the Vietnam War was a way for the Powers That Be to continue their military adventurism with the lowest possible societal cost.  Think of it, right now, with active duty members and reserves, there a little over 2.1 million soldiers in the armed forces, total.  There are an estimated 22 million veterans in society, so all told, military personal account for about 8% of the population.  This a incredibly small figure, for a reason.  By cutting down the amount of people who have ever served in the military, you cut down the political risk of treating them like shit or putting them in unwinnable situations.  It's the main reason why every time a VA scandal makes the news, it dies relatively quickly,without anything being done to fix it; there just aren't enough people around to make a fuss big enough for Congress or anyone else to take notice and keep giving a fuck.

The other nail in our coffin, as I see it, is that we are becoming an increasingly stupider country. Almost half the country believes the Book of Genesis is literally true, and thanks to the ever increasing amount of idiots not vaccinating their kids, diseases like measles and whooping cough are all enjoying fresh outbreaks when we had almost eradicated them like polio and smallpox.  This trend of disregarding evidence "because I just don't believe it, you know?" is an especially worrying one, it doesn't do us any good to live in the information age if we can't assess or judge the quality of the information that's constantly bombarding us..

How our educational system got into such a pitiful state is probably a post of its own, so for now I want to focus on an exemplar and driver of our collective ignorance, and that's Texas.  Due to its sheer physical size and market value, textbook publishers generally just follow the guidelines set by Texas Board of Education for textbooks and sell those books nationwide.  To give you an idea of why this a problem, the Texas GOP Party Platform, aka the people who actually make up the board, once declared that it was formally opposed to teaching critical thinking skills.  There's also the problem that the Board's main goal is rewriting American history so that it looks like it was a glorious thing born out of the brilliance of (exclusively) white Christians.  Taking this bullshit to its natural conclusion is why there are books in Texas calling slaves migrant workers or how Moses was a Founding Father.

We might be able to survive such an onslaught of stupid, but our education just isn't up to handling it. We're consistently falling further and further behind the rest of the world in virtually every subject there is.  We'll never catch up until we can guarantee a quality education for everyone, but since none of the education reform conversations involve breaking the funding tie between schools and property taxes in lieu of straight national and state funding, if your neighborhood is shit, than your education will be, too.  And that just sucks for you.

The most frustrating thing is that all of problems, be they education, our broken health care system, our crumbling infrastructure, are easily solvable.  We can look out to the rest of the world and see higher quality educational systems paid for entirely by the state all the way through college in some countries.  We also see state run health care systems that have exactly zero of the problems ours faces. But are we going to actually do any of those things? No, because we don't want to.  The idea that anyone who doesn't overcome the hardships is inherently lesser is an idea that is something so ingrained in our culture I honestly think we forget it's there.  That idea makes any government action to improve the quality of life feel humiliating instead of altruistic.  So instead we'll just keep on flaying around blind in the dark looking for any other solution as we continue our slide to becoming the richest third world country the world's ever seen.  But we'll still have our pride, at least.