Growing Pains

In light of the murder of Trayvon Martin and the killings in Tulsa, Oklahoma… In light of the adversarial nature of our politics… In light of a shrinking economic reality for many in this country… There are some hard truths to be faced in this country, again!

There has never been a time where this country was as accepting of people from different cultures, racial violence so few and far between that it takes back-to-back experiences to remind people that it is still possible, and racial/gender/lifestyle inequality to grow to a point that we are collectively reminded that it still exists.  Are we all the way to the place that Dr. King dreamed about?  Hardly, but we are steadily making progress.  You might say, if we’re making so much progress what is this that we are experiencing now?  Growing Pains

We are not a post-racial society where all people are treated equally and everyone gets along, sorry Rodney King.  We are not an ultra-civilized society where hate is dealt with before it fans itself into violence, rage and murder.  We are really not so far removed from who we were before Barack Obama, before Affirmative Action, before Women’s Rights, or before the Civil Rights Movement.  We are still, by and large, a collective of marginalized tribes who loosely tolerate each other in public forums and voluntarily segregate ourselves in a time where legal segregation has been abolished.  We still privately laugh a jokes about other races, ethnicities and cultures while doing our best to put on a tolerant face in public.  We hold ourselves to one standard and hold others to another standard.  We hoard our own accomplishments and achievements, stand in the way of others reaching our level, and scrape and claw to gain the accomplishments and achievements of those above us.  We still hold adjectives and hyphens in front of our citizenship.  The State of our Union is SNAFU!

Depressed yet?  Don’t be.

What I just listed is a litany that some folks would have you believe.  Some people, who made their names in the struggles for equality, are still fighting those battles even after they are won.  That (who and what we were) is not this (who and what we are now).  We are a much different people than we were 4, 10, or even 30 years ago.

As a nation and a culture, we are growing into a new identity which is larger and altogether different than what we once were.  We can no longer be a nation of hard-working, gentrified, consumers.  We have to and are becoming a nation of smart-working, progressively equal-opportunity, creators.  As we opened our economic borders to the rest of the world, we opened our economic entitlement to them as well.  We can’t afford top-notch retirement plans and healthcare without lowering the cost of living that we’ve enjoyed AND paying more into those systems.  We don’t provide the best and the cheapest costs because there are others who make better, produce it cheaper, or both.  We don’t have an ideological trump card on the world because everyone sees our follies as clearly as we do.  We became one of the throng, though admittedly one of the largest, instead of being the beacon on the hill.  What that means is that there is more opportunity than ever before but it also means that you have to work harder for it than ever before.

We’re experiencing pains now because our trappings (our lives, safety nets, clothes, cars, politics, families and communities) are getting smaller while our responsibilities (innovation, cost-effectiveness, accountability, right-thought coupled with right-action) are larger than ever.  We need bigger and altogether different trappings to fit us where we are.  We need to invent, build, and revolutionize markets instead of just passing tests, getting a degree, and expecting that our lessons are sufficient to our exercises.  Your parents’ and grandparents’ upbringing is insufficient to these times.  This is not to say it is invalid…morals, ethics, and values are more important now than ever.  Still, we need more.  We need those morals, ethics and values to apply to everyone, not just ourselves.  Now is a time where the Declaration of Independence, that belief that started us down this path, must be held true.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

The only part that they got wrong was to only mention men.  All people are created equal with the rights of Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

• When a person or people take a life (Trayvon Martin, Tulsa Killings, US Soldier in Afghanistan shootings), it is our responsibility to hold them accountable.
• When a person or people take others Liberties (Jerry Sandusky, Latino citizens being racially profiled throughout the Southern US, unequal sentencing on the basis of race, SOPA/PIPA), it is our responsibility to see the perpetrators stopped, retribution made, and the actions rebuked.
• When others try to deny the rights of citizens their pursuit of Happiness (bans on gay marriage, predatory lending, discrimination in the workplace), it is our responsibility to see it stopped and those individuals responsible punished for their actions.

We are closer to being united than we have ever been, but we have to make some wholesale changes to take the next steps lest we falter because we have clothed ourselves in trappings that won’t take us any further.