Samir Shukla
By Samir Shukla
Let’s all take a breather. Calm down a bit. There’s this chorus being sung around the country. This chorus is haphazard, way off key and needs to disband. This uninvited chorus needs to stop singing about the imminent or perceived death of America and its democracy.
The US of A isn’t dying. Its democratic institutions will survive Bumps and Dumps and Trumps. Good Tidings, Bad Tidings, and Bidens. Congress, Digress and Scotus Hocus Pocus. Right wingers, left wingers, and those of no moral clarity whatsoever.
The cynicism is palpable, even understandable, but the word when preached incessantly, annoys me to no end.
We are going through a realignment of the American story. This is common. The characters and narratives are different, but this is typical. Social, economic, and cultural realignments happen to every generation. The country’s ever-present evolution into something different continues.
The disconnects are always there, between genders and generations, between geographies and ideologies, between rural and urban, between the able and the unable, but all social conundrums are surmountable.
Every generation needs to work on two basic things – economic equity and social fairness – and if each generation makes these a little better than before, all other dissonance just becomes hot air, it will come and go.
The political season, the election season, turns this gloom and doom scenario, this cynicism, into a wide-screen high-def illusion.
A chorus of the downfall or degradation of America is everywhere. Cowardice is not the issue here. Americans are brave. Americans are strong. What I’m talking about is the unrealistic fear that has crept into our lives and daily existence. They are amplified by the politicians, media, marketers and unchecked gossip, and the worst of all solvable but self-defeating things, personal anxieties.
Politicians and propaganda specialists are constantly using fear appeals to arouse anger and distrust in us. They play on people’s long-established perceptions and deep-seated fears to make them act in the manner they wish them to act. It’s election season, after all.
Every generation, every election cycle, needs the reasoned and reasonable folks to stand tall and get to work. The work is simple. Don’t fall prey to cynicism. America isn’t dying. Participation in its evolution into something better, though, requires constant vigilance and electoral and social participation. No excuses.
No more bogus chorus.
Samir Shukla is the Editor of Saathee Magazine
Contact: samir@saathee.com
Twitter/X: @ShuklaWrites
Newsletter: ShuklaWrites.Substack.com
