Such a great essay with great ideas! We have the know-how and the tech to build a sustainable future for the entire country. However, some Americans simply refuse to buy into the future because they don’t, can’t or won’t allow themselves to see it. Toxic nostalgia and entrenched racism keeps them blind. Toxic nostalgia keeps people looking back at a time that seems rosy in the rear view mirror. Sometimes that toxic nostalgia comes from the inability to face their own demons. Don’t acknowledge that one parent drank too much or another beat the other — just keep believing that Daddy was noble for working in the mines and Mommy was the best homemaker ever. The mindset takes its cue from “honor thy mother and father.” Yes, honor,but don’t gloss over what didn’t work or was harmful. The other aspect that comes with toxic nostalgia is racism. America’s legacy of racial inequality is deeply entrenched and entwined with the toxic nostalgia. It comes out in the belief that if everyone other than white guys was out of the marketplace or in subservient positions that the world would be just fine. But that isn’t the case. That’s a form of tyranny that enslaves the many of the sake of the few (seriously, if you put together all the women and all the minorities, and all the immigrants, they become the majority!) Toxic nostalgia works on the memory and the mind to negate the future by creating fear in those who see themselves as the rulers. If the petty tyrants have to give up being breadwinners in their homes so that others can share the wealth and prosperity — well, who then will they become? The future gives these individuals only a view that they will be one of many, sharing prosperity, and this harms what they believe is their “god given right.” Changing how one group that is still the majority sees the world to understand the benefits will extend to them, too, is a daunting task. There were so many, white men and women, who saw Barak Obama and Michelle Obama as threats to their very being. How could a black woman be more “classy” than a white woman? How can she be a better mother, a better wife, than a white woman? How can a black man see a future? How can we buy into a future created by a black man when WE are the rulers of this country from the start? That’s how some probably think. That’s what may be what propels them to vote for the Trumps, McConnells and Ryans out there. The world is an all or nothing proposition: I have mine, all the rest bow before me. Maybe the solution is to start with areas like inner city Baltimore AND some small town in West Virginia; Detroit AND Youngstown. Demonstrate to those who still want to be noble mineworkers like their granddads that solar fields are better than mines and that they *can* do the job to build and maintain them. If we can get buy in from those who hold on to toxic nostalgia, then we can make a future. Until then, we will keep repeating the mistakes of the 20th century.
