American Karma

Moral Choice and Human Awareness

umair haque
a book of nights
2 min readDec 5, 2016

--

Karma simply means, at the simplest level, seeing the consequences of your actions. This is sanity. The hardest thing in all the world. Really seeing what is, not what you want, hope, wish, need to see.

What happened to America? The story is very simple. I can tell it in three sentences.

The right campaigned for a complete implosion of the state, and got it. The left campaigned for the enrichment of a very few, the winners, the talented, the fortunate, and got it. The result was a vacuum, of several kinds: a vacuum of society, an imploded middle class, and a destroyed American dream.

In that vacuum, extremism always arises. The story of demagogues rising in the vacuums left by failed leaders is as ancient as time and as ever present as the stars. It’s the story of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, etc.

Now the question on everyone’s lips is: how do we fix America? The answer is very simple.

We cannot fix what we cannot see. And Americans, especially American leaders, do not see any of this, do they? Either they have put their hopes on Trump, or they are still partisans of the old order. But almost nowhere is there a simple recognition of history: the right wanted to implode the state, and it did, the left wanted to reward the winners and it did, and the vacuum that was left yielded extremism.

Now the practical solutions to extremism are just as simple as it’s causes. Investment in people, in the basics of life they are furious at not having. Thus a society contests the vacuum that the demagogue fills. That is how demagoguery is fought, not with condemnation, but with material progress for the abandoned.

But those pragmatic solutions cannot emerge until a society really sees. Sees it’s choices for what they are. Who am I? I was an economist. Then I saw I was just another person, full of yearning and heartbreak. Who are we? We are Americans. But it is truer to say that we are just people. People who must reckon with our karma, or karma will reckon with us.

Umair

December 2016

--

--