Fear is the mind-killer, right?
I dunno, I’ve never been someone who believed that was a wholesale truth. Apprehension, worry, and even outright fear can serve a purpose. It can help you realize the error of your ways or even save you from a situation that has “BAD IDEA” written all over it. Unfortunately, fear more often than not becomes a rationale for a retreat into a comfortable, empty stagnation.
This is the problem I have with American exceptionalism. At its base, the idea is simple enough: We are different; we are an outlier; the same old solutions will not work here because, by God, we are the United States and in God we trust. Find a country that doesn’t believe this to some extent, and I’ll show you a nation that is either newly-created or suffering an identity crisis.
We have problems, substantial ones at that and blindly parroting the mantra of American exceptionalism is, ironically enough, hamstringing the very characteristics that gave rise to this theory in the first place. The American exception is not something that just came to be through some sort of metaphysical endowment, it was forged by average men and women who saw an opportunity and seized it. The story behind American exceptionalism is not one of a divine blessing upon us, but one of how a plastic society could adapt itself with time to incorporate revolutionary ideas, inventions and movements from within.
That’s not the case now. More often than not, American exceptionalism is banner behind which a small-minded group of people cower, afraid to admit that times are not only changing, but they are on the losing side of history. Rather than being used as motivation to continually improve our nation’s social, economic and political fabric, it is the rallying cry for each and every person who is crippled by the fear of living in a world they no longer understand.
Well, tough.
I like the idea of a world where people can share equal rights regardless of whether their genitals are different or the same. I like the idea of an America that is dedicated to exhausting all possible alternatives before resorting to flying deceased American soldiers into the States in the dead of night to hide the true cost of war from the media. I like a country that can be prosperous while still making sure that those who stand to be abused most by those who are most apt to do so are protected under a variety of measures. I like an America that can be intelligent enough, humble enough and wise enough to admit that sometimes we don’t have the best ideas.
Things are going to have to change. Everything from the way our government spends our money to the way our very economy is structured to the manner in which we resolve our disputes around the world cannot stay the same. Business as usual breeds complacency, complacency causes an intellectual stagnation, which leads to fear and self-destruction.
