People make personal resolutions for New Year’s Day, taking stock of their lives and resolving to become better human beings in the coming year. In this great American tradition of aspirations to improve our personal lives, I would like to turn this annual exercise on its head and try to make that a “collective” resolution: Let’s try to leave a better “America” to our posterity as a whole. So, instead of improving our personal lives, which is laudable in itself, we should want to improve our nation as our legacy to posterity.
To accomplish this, we need to take stock of what we are about to bequeath to our future generations. Naturally, questions abound in this quest. Most obvious and urgent simply because it is as ubiquitous as the air we breathe: How should we feel about the fact that our children will receive more of their social nourishment from TV’s ever-enticing “reality shows” than from their parents or history? Is TV the symbol of greatness for their parents’ generation? How would our next generation deal with the celebrity worship that we have created and perfected for them, so that they have no idea what’s real and what’s make-believe, thinking these celebrity “role models” really love them and will lead them to happiness and fulfillment?
How about social media? It is the king of our lonely and depressing world that pushes both adults and teenagers to suicide. Do we believe that our next generation, armed with this instrument, would be smarter citizens, better neighbors, and sweeter to each other in the family than we are? Or, don’t we know in our heart of hearts that the next generation, raised by the nannies of social media and smart phones, would surely be the most unloved and most uninformed of all generations? And the government pledges billions of dollars to “expand” the “benefits” of the Internet all over America to make sure no corner of our lives is untouched by it. With the expanded bandwidth, more misery and misinformation, not less, would surely follow.
Should we feel confident, and glad in our hearts, that our children will inherit the capitalist system whose worst defects we have perfected — the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer? Are we happy that our next generation will comply with the system more obediently than we, making a grand mockery of our so-called “political system” as the counterweight to economic injustice?
Then there is America’s alarmingly dishonest and distrusting society. Would our children be more socially conscious citizens and voters, or more intelligent consumers, withstanding the ever-perfected political propaganda and corporate advertisements, which take advantage of their ever-weakening ability to recognize and resist? We may yet leave them immunized against COVID-19, but we leave them completely naked against political and corporate deceptions that are becoming increasingly harder to recognize and resist?
Would they remember what “America” meant to those who lived and died for its ideals? Or, what would happen to the Great American Experiment for Liberty and Justice for All? The most damning of all, for which our posterity will never forgive us, we have been sowing the seeds of Constitutional Fascism, the first in our history, but to be the last chapter in the book of American Exceptionalism.
Indeed, what are we planting now for our children’s future? Hollywood’s fantasy? Disneyland’s fake love? Madison Avenue’s trickery? Wall Street’s cannibalism? Consumerism’s self-immolation? Will our next generations be thrilled with what we expanded and perfected for them, so that everything we inherited ourselves, from Hollywood to consumerism, is many times more seductive and addictive for our children? Would they be better citizens and neighbors and their lives happier than ours? How did it happen that we received our legacy from the “Greatest Generation” (Tom Brokaw’s book) and are about to bequeath it to the “Dumbest Generation” (Mark Bauerlein’s book)?
Is there anything we can do as individuals to stop our degeneration’s progress? The answer is no: America’s present and future ills are not individual phenomena and thus cannot be resolved by individual remedies. Your own goodness does not make Sin City a Holy City. Only massive national actions can resolve national degeneration. But such a Great Awakening is not forthcoming, as we have sunk too deeply into our own cultural quagmire. The viral pandemic, instead of awakening and uniting our collective spirit as it was once hoped, is only teaching our children to arm and take to the street for whatever they “Don’t like.”
America’s national demise was not built in a day. It has taken decades of our neglect, indulgence and laziness, mostly since the end of World War II. Twenty-plus American generations built the “Shining City on a Hill,” and now only three generations of deregulated America are dismantling it, click by click.
As we declare and resolve to be better human beings and celebrate the Happy New Year, the ship of America still sails its uncharted course, which promises to be stormy and turbulent. What collective resolutions can we make, together as a generation, to leave the nation to posterity better than we inherited? Perhaps resolving to clear our minds long enough to raise such a question is already a resolution of heroic proportions?
Jon Huer, columnist for the Recorder and professor emeritus, lives in Greenfield. He is the author of a dozen books of social commentaries, art criticisms, and political economy, including “The Dead End” which TIME magazine called “an important and brilliant book (about) America’s national death wish.”