What if the United States stinks?

Though I have been writing some psychotherapy recently, my feeling is that it’s been pushed aside by the sickness and alarm I feel for our country. We all know or knew there was supposed to be an “American spirit” which had something to do with individualism and energy, entrepreneurial gusto and expansive or competitive drive. And somehow we were given to believe that this was a positive feeling-spirit. But what if its real essence has only been an id-like “get rich” or “beat the competition” vibe and nothing else? What if the American character actually has no good character other than any given person’s expected decency that says “hi” to neighbors, helps them raise their barn and put out their fires, taken in the aggregate and talked, by history, into a mythology?

What if America really stinks?

I am thinking it is true. In which case – at least for me – the only alternative will be to mentally deconstruct the whole idea of a “nation” and just picture the aggregate without myth: an uncoagulated number living in their partly submerged hearts and bent heads. No more watching the news to see who shot whom, who marched in this or that direction, who waved which flag today. No more contemplating and discussing what the neurotics in Washington have done over my head, because there are countless types of neurotics: Borderlines and Narcissists, domestic violence perpetrators, the generally anxious, childish parents, intellectual adolescents, codependents, depressed adults, alcoholics and drug addicts, the power-hungry. You can’t watch each one, other than to extend your umbrella at arm’s length to keep them at a distance, or do therapy with them.

If the Trump family wins again, its sociopathy will pervade the country like pig shit E. coli dispersed by some serial killer into the nation’s waterways. The others, who are not comfortable but sickened in this atmosphere, will buy bottled water and wear blinders to allow sight of only family and friends. We will applaud, mildly, those strange people who march off to war* for big causes, the Martin Kings and the Greta Thunbergs, wondering if they’ll be victorious some day. But our deepest need, I believe, will be for each of us to form an evolved emotional philosophy spurred by this devolution, that appreciates nature and science more than society, children more than politics, heart more than world.

With one eye, we see that humanity over the millennia has progressed beyond intrinsic barbar­ism. With the other eye we see it has always had a rapid-cycling bipolar disorder, expansively and irritably** riding bright-colored balloons that inflate and burst every four to eight years, needing medication and hospitalization, compassion and four-point restraint.

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* Johnny, I Hardly Knew Ye – https://www.brownanddana.com/audio/Track09.mp3.

** Criterion A – https://www.sunovionhealthinsights.com/shi/bipolar-depression/bipolar-depression-overview/dsm-diagnostic-criteria.html.