America is Boiling Over
— and why this is a good thing
To many opinion-makers, Donald Trump’s presidential campaign is the symptom of (and cause for) things going wrong in America today. However, in trying to capture what’s happening in our country, we need to cast a wider net.
This is something much bigger than Trump.
Look at all the other movements: Black Lives Matter, the spate of college protests, and the rise of another atypical, though popular, presidential candidate. Let’s recall the rise of the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street. Movements in this country are everywhere…and they’re all part of a better future.
The financial crisis of 2007–08 saw the big banks on the brink. The government moved to prop them up with hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars. How did the people feel about this?
“We received two kinds of calls from constituents regarding the bailouts,” a US Congressman would later say. “No, and Hell No.”
The bailouts were approved.
The Right reacted with the Tea Party. The Left responded with Occupy Wall Street. Each have had lasting effects from recent militia stand-offs out West to the rise of current presidential candidates. And this, in part, is because US economic concerns continue with disproportionate harm to the middle and working classes.
As significant as the reason for these movements has been their vehicle.
Americans have enjoyed a new medium for easy, swift, and organized reactions. The internet has also expedited the spread of information and exposes that which previously may have been quickly forgotten, unnoticed, or perhaps even swept under the rug. The internet’s ability to take a spark of a local issue and turn it into an inferno engulfing the nation fueled subsequent movements, namely, Black Lives Matter.
While Black Lives Matter has taken to the streets, recent college protests around the country have been inspired to occupy campuses. Then of course, we have these anti-establishment presidential candidates Trump and Bernie Sanders who’ve risen because of the discontentment and collective voice of their supporters — wherein lies the root of the problems with America today (as well as the key to why the future is bright.)
All these movements are related not just in their connections to financial insecurity and use of the internet, but in how they’re the product of American institutions straining under the pressure of a society no longer contained (nor contented) within the systems in play. The financial system failed. The legal system has been failing pockets of the country. The political system hasn’t represented the people adequately.
A failure in systems may sound like a cause for alarm. (This is bigger than Trump.) And indeed, with the internet allowing for unprecedented exposure to the mass shootings, economic disparity, injustice, bigotry, acts of war, corruption, inner cities struggle, police violence — and then the reactive aggression from all these movements — it’s easy to believe that conditions in America are worsening.
But this list of problems has always existed in the US, and such reactions from the population have always been the potential. All of this is now simply seeing the light of day. And this exposure allows for correction, an examination of who we are vs. who we can and should be.
In the wake of countless issues and episodes in contemporary American society discussions ensue, comparisons are made, lessons are learned, old thinking gets replaced with new, standards rise, and truth surfaces — all at an accelerating rate.
And here’s the kicker: because the impetus for much of this upheaval has been systemic, the people have necessarily stepped up, ringing in a new era of popular empowerment. As controversial (and at times harmful) as the above movements are, they’ve enhanced the democratic process, enhanced transparency in our legal system, created new media outlets, and are rooting out age-old social ills.
Yes, Americans have used the internet to create mountains out of molehills (or no hill at all). And yes, there appears political polarity unlike ever before. But the progress outpaces the problems of a society shedding the skin of an old order.
Trump 2016 is good for America — at least from the standpoint of exposing divisive thinking, violent tendencies from the Right and Left, and false hype/hope. (And even if he, or Bernie Sanders for that matter, would be elected president, I expect either man’s ideas would be tempered by the reality of their difficulty and the fact that government leaders just aren’t as important and influential as they used to be. I would see their election as another step toward a future belonging not to the establishment and those “in power” but to the people.)
Meanwhile, to say nothing of the positive changes they’ve fought for, just by their presence the Black Lives Matter movement has drawn attention to black-on-black violence. As a result, the #BlackTruce movement recently took hold in Minnesota as fifty fed-up people marched in St. Paul, drawing awareness to this fatal and prolific trend, whose latest victims were found at a hotel along Snelling Avenue.
Together, these movements signify a country exposing its social defects, and they represent a chance to use the resultant insights and empowerment to steer ourselves with a moral compass pointed more true than ever before.
Brandon Ferdig is a Minneapolis-based writer. He can be reached at brandon@theperiphery.com and on Twitter: @brandonferdig
