A Culture of Fear

I can’t watch the news anymore.

I love my country, but we have so much work to do.

I’ve been talking a lot recently about temporarily moving to another country, not because I hate the United States, but because I love to travel and I want to see the world. A common response I get when talking about some more ‘off-the-beaten-path’ type places: “Is it safe there?”

My response: “Is it safe here?”

People think I’m crazy for wanting to see what the food is like in Thailand or visit the lanterns in Hoi An because they’ve only heard about bad things that happen there.

Seventeen people were killed at a school in Florida today, and there may be more, and yet we have the gall to question the safety of other countries.

We have such a skewed view about how amazing our country is. We are the best! We beat everyone at everything! Everyone wants to come here, so many in fact that we must build a wall to keep people out!

Our patriotism is borderline insanity.

Like I said, I love my country. I’m so lucky to have been born here and grow up here, but we have to start paying attention to what is happening here and around the world. All nations fall, but we are young. We have life left. We have to acknowledge our short-comings. We have to have really difficult conversations. We need to fix the things that aren’t working.

The first step is admitting there’s a problem.

I really don’t like, or agree, with the notion of ‘Making America Great Again,’ when we haven’t defined what that means. At what point do we become ‘great?’ We have a lot of people who just want to cover up the problems, look right by them and say ‘that’s just life,’ while only focusing on the things that will help them.

That is such bullshit. Wake up and realize we are not perfect. We are a culture that pushes and pushes people until there’s nothing left. We idolize celebrities who haven’t really done anything worthwhile (some have, some haven’t). We still have cops killing black people. In turn we demonize cops, so it’s obvious we’re all about that ‘punish the whole class’ mentality, on both sides of the equation. Speaking of class, our teachers aren’t respected at all and definitely aren’t paid enough. Trans kids are still killing themselves at an alarming rate. So many bullied kids become bullies and take it to the extreme, committing mass-murder. Our politicians keep using the same lines over and over again like we’re just going to keep buying it.

What makes us Great is that we are a nation designed to fix these problems when they happen. We are not a communist country. We are not a socialist country. We are not under a totalitarian regime. That is the brilliance of our design: We. Can. Change.

I can’t watch the news anymore, because it’s always the same story over and over again and I don’t need to see it on the television when I see it everyday in person. Drive around your city, the good parts and the bad, and really look. It’s there. Pay attention to people and actually listen when they talk. It’s there.

It makes me so sad that we are so stuck. We’re in a rut. We’re like, in the teenage years as a nation where it’s all just going to shit and we don’t know who we are anymore.

I don’t know where I’m going with this now I’m so distraught. I guess I’m trying to say: please approach with love, not fear. Not hate. Not malice. We have to coexist. That doesn’t mean you’ll like everyone you meet or agree with them, but at the end of the day, we’re all just trying to make it. We have a lot more commonalities than differences, whether you like it or not.