The United States Will Not Survive If…
- it continues to believe that people must “work hard” and “earn” the right to live safely and comfortably: The nation could provide “free” healthcare and education (through college and beyond!) for much less than its current practices.
- it continues to let its people die en masse because they do not have access to good healthcare, food, and water: Food deserts, for example, are real.
- it continues to think that the Earth exist to serve humans: Disastrous, irreversible climate change/global warming is real and human-made.
- it continues to believe that work is necessary: In the next few years, robots will make most humans unemployable.
- it continues to allow Fundamentalist Christian theology to have a role in policy decisions: More and more people are embracing either theologies of liberation or they are embracing atheism.
- it continues to have non-stop multi-year political campaigns: People are getting too stressed out with every day being a day where political campaigns capture our attention, and social media, for all of its uniquely positive power, only amplifies such stress.
- it continues to be controlled, politically and economically, by the ultra rich: The divide between the rich and the poor is at its height, and there is no middle class for all practical purposes.
- it continues to have forms of government that are not accountable to the people: As George Lakoff writes in The Political Mind, private corporations (because of neoliberalism, a very conservative ideology) currently function as the government in the United States.
- it continues to ignore the role of Whiteness and the importance of intersectionality: Racism and Sexism, for example, are real and must be acknowledged.
- it continues to insist that it’s the greatest and chosen nation….because it’s not, never has been either.
- it continues to have people en masse who can’t read, write, or think: People can graduate high school without the ability to read or write a sentence.
- it continues to have people afraid of change, experts, and rules and regulations.
- it continues to devalue, disrespect, ignore, and ridicule its younger members: Children, Teenagers, and Adults under 35 are treated very poorly by society.
- it continues to pay unfairly: Professors, for example, should not be in dire poverty, and CEOs should not make hundreds of times more every hour than the people who actually run the company.
- it continues to embrace nationalism, to bully other nations, and to provoke unnecessary wars in order to show its power, to make money, and to pretend danger is imminent such that people will follow the selected Father Figure.
And, of course, history (and science) tells us that the United States will not, cannot, last forever.
Dr. Andrew Joseph Pegoda
Dr. Andrew Joseph Pegoda 