The Problem of Being American

Love and Cruelty

Like you, perhaps, I’ve been thinking about America lately. Where it went wrong. An age where a collapsed province drinks toxic waste, mass shootings are regular events, and you and I seem at bitter odds about it all. Here’s what occurred to me.

Americans differ among ends. The left wants this kind of society, the right wants that kind of society, the capitalists want this, the feminists want that, the neoliberals want this. But they don’t differ much when it comes to means. The means that every faction, coalition, group, “ism”, employs are similar. Cruelty, retaliation, mockery, laughter, ridicule, spite, bitterness, anger, outrage, fury. Brutality. Not physical, perhaps, but emotional, verbal, social, cultural, personal, which are, indeed, every bit as, and often more, harmful. The wounds of the flesh can only heal, but the wounds of the heart can go on bleeding a whole lifetime long.

Now. You will probably object. “But the left doesn’t dox people! The left isn’t Nazis!” and so on. You are right. They don’t, and they aren't. But you are flattening the point. Reducing the meaning of it to a single example, or an off the charts extreme, and making it about “left” and “right”, which it isn’t. The point is: (more and more savage) brutality is the means by which groups express their wants, needs, desires, whichever…