I’ve long thought of America as a teenaged country.
We’ve been around for 200+ years, but on the world stage of civilizations, that’s about enough time to sneeze.
When you consider that Hawaii, our 50th state was added in 1959 … a mere 47 years ago, you start to appreciate the fact that we’re a very young Nation compared to a nation like Iraq, whose northern city of Kirkuk is more than 5000 years old.
Which isn’t to say this has been a quiet quarter-millennium. The history of America is actually quite fascinating. It has enough sex, drugs, whodunits and rock stars to be a great story—for the written page, musical expressions, movies, or campfire tales.
We have enough heroes, villains, and ordinary people of greatness to stoke the imagination.
It would be a lot of fun to sit the nation down in a therapist’s chair and get a thorough examination of our psyche.
In many ways our country has some of the psychology of a teenager.
We’re quite idealistic still, and have enough successes under our belt to make us see our highs as higher than others, and as failures as more moderate than our competitors.
We’re pretty tough on our elders, and we completely exhibit the personality of the proverbial man “born on third base, who thinks he hit a triple.”
That’s not always a bad thing, and you should know that I’m an extremely proud American, through and though.
But there is one aspect our of adolescence that disturbs me, at times.
We have an incredibly short attention span. Just like I did as a teenager. The record suggests that we find it difficult to carry forward the significance of even a cataclysmic moment for more than a few months.
The media is partly to blame for this, and takes a fair amount of legitimate criticism for its revenue-chasing approach to deciding what’s “important.”
Our news cycle is 24-hours long and its perpetuators can plop a video camera down at any coordinate on the planet within an hour or so and beam the resulting images to every household on the globe. As a result, we’ve come to accept that our instant access to moving pictures of far away places reflects an accurate window on the world.
It does not.
The world is a gigantic place, and while television has bent the physics concept that an object cannot occupy more than one place at a time, it has not negated it.
Emotions last a lot longer than the attention we give them.
But when your only window to the emotions of the world is a constantly shifting collage of new crises, and the image of the moment—it doesn’t take very long to start limiting your feelings about the impact of a moment to its duration in the news cycle.
A widow grieves long after she stops crying. If you are incapable of recognizing the breadth, height, and width of her pain measured across time once her tears are dry, you lose the sympathy and empathy that are required to knit the hearts of humans into a common thread.
On these pages and entries, I’ve passed through a lot of topics. Today, I want to take a moment to remind you that they all still have repercussions.
It is imperative to expand your memory to realize and accept that an event lasts much longer than its headlines.
There are still thousands of people who disappeared in the Christmas tsunami. No trace of them has ever been found. Their families still have to cope with that loss.
Right now, people are still dying in Sudan.
Vice president Cheney is still the man who was careless enough to have shot one of his best friends.
President Clinton is still the man whose morals allowed him to get his Johnson smoked under the desk by an intern.
The city of New Orleans is still a filthy, dysfunctional shell of its former self.
Attacks on Americans fighting in Iraq are still happening every hour.
President Bush is still the man who taunted the so-called terrorists to “bring it on.”
The 190th Congress is still the most inactive legislative body in our short history.
People are still mourning 9/11.
That young man is still responsible for dealing with emotional fallout of having to decide how to respond to a very powerful predatory letch.
Veterans are still waking up every night with nightmares.
Every story you’ve ever seen on every newscast, or in every newspaper is still echoing through the minds of the people who were involved.
The teenaged mind is very capable of being trained and developed into a productive adult mind.
What sort of grown-up will our Nation become?
We’ve been around for 200+ years, but on the world stage of civilizations, that’s about enough time to sneeze.
When you consider that Hawaii, our 50th state was added in 1959 … a mere 47 years ago, you start to appreciate the fact that we’re a very young Nation compared to a nation like Iraq, whose northern city of Kirkuk is more than 5000 years old.
Which isn’t to say this has been a quiet quarter-millennium. The history of America is actually quite fascinating. It has enough sex, drugs, whodunits and rock stars to be a great story—for the written page, musical expressions, movies, or campfire tales.
We have enough heroes, villains, and ordinary people of greatness to stoke the imagination.
It would be a lot of fun to sit the nation down in a therapist’s chair and get a thorough examination of our psyche.
In many ways our country has some of the psychology of a teenager.
We’re quite idealistic still, and have enough successes under our belt to make us see our highs as higher than others, and as failures as more moderate than our competitors.
We’re pretty tough on our elders, and we completely exhibit the personality of the proverbial man “born on third base, who thinks he hit a triple.”
That’s not always a bad thing, and you should know that I’m an extremely proud American, through and though.
But there is one aspect our of adolescence that disturbs me, at times.
We have an incredibly short attention span. Just like I did as a teenager. The record suggests that we find it difficult to carry forward the significance of even a cataclysmic moment for more than a few months.
The media is partly to blame for this, and takes a fair amount of legitimate criticism for its revenue-chasing approach to deciding what’s “important.”
Our news cycle is 24-hours long and its perpetuators can plop a video camera down at any coordinate on the planet within an hour or so and beam the resulting images to every household on the globe. As a result, we’ve come to accept that our instant access to moving pictures of far away places reflects an accurate window on the world.
It does not.
The world is a gigantic place, and while television has bent the physics concept that an object cannot occupy more than one place at a time, it has not negated it.
Emotions last a lot longer than the attention we give them.
But when your only window to the emotions of the world is a constantly shifting collage of new crises, and the image of the moment—it doesn’t take very long to start limiting your feelings about the impact of a moment to its duration in the news cycle.
A widow grieves long after she stops crying. If you are incapable of recognizing the breadth, height, and width of her pain measured across time once her tears are dry, you lose the sympathy and empathy that are required to knit the hearts of humans into a common thread.
On these pages and entries, I’ve passed through a lot of topics. Today, I want to take a moment to remind you that they all still have repercussions.
It is imperative to expand your memory to realize and accept that an event lasts much longer than its headlines.
There are still thousands of people who disappeared in the Christmas tsunami. No trace of them has ever been found. Their families still have to cope with that loss.
Right now, people are still dying in Sudan.
Vice president Cheney is still the man who was careless enough to have shot one of his best friends.
President Clinton is still the man whose morals allowed him to get his Johnson smoked under the desk by an intern.
The city of New Orleans is still a filthy, dysfunctional shell of its former self.
Attacks on Americans fighting in Iraq are still happening every hour.
President Bush is still the man who taunted the so-called terrorists to “bring it on.”
The 190th Congress is still the most inactive legislative body in our short history.
People are still mourning 9/11.
That young man is still responsible for dealing with emotional fallout of having to decide how to respond to a very powerful predatory letch.
Veterans are still waking up every night with nightmares.
Every story you’ve ever seen on every newscast, or in every newspaper is still echoing through the minds of the people who were involved.
The teenaged mind is very capable of being trained and developed into a productive adult mind.
What sort of grown-up will our Nation become?
(8 Oct 06)
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