What needs reforming isn't so much the US political system, Nigee, as the US political sensibility.
There is a civil war of words in this country...
Not between whites and blacks...
Not between workers and bosses...
Not between the urban and rural areas...
It's between an Old America and an emerging New America.
To be clear:
"Old" doesn't mean "wrong" or "disgusting," that is...I'm not including, say, Rush Limbaugh and like-minded droning-on-drones and blowhards when I say this.
By "Old America," I mean the sort of America one might stereotypically imagine even just a decade or so ago:
Mostly white.
"Defined" minorities in Blacks, Latinos, and Asians.
Nearly all Judeo-Christian, at least publicly.
Most some sort of Protestant denomination; Jews and Catholics noted religious minorities.
The life-plan of:
1. K-12 schooling,
2. Get a menial, part-time job, say, flipping burgers or at a movie theatre,
3. Get a license and car,
4. Start dating,
5. 4-year college degree,
6. Graduate, get a full-time job out of college, and get married, in various orders...
7. Get a house, then a better car, then a better house, etc.,
8. Have kids,
9. Have those kids begin the process and finally,
10. Retire around 60, 65 or so, and then play out the string until then end, as it were.
That sort of stable pattern that governed generations no longer is so linear or predictable or universal; for instance, I know a lot of folks here of older generations may have considered getting a car one of the great moments of their life, at least they may have felt it was at the time, a feeling of "Oh boy, a car, FINALLY!" whereas now, I'm sure that's still a feeling many do feel, but with the Internet, I would venture that the way most such people felt about cars, some (myself included) would feel that way instead about getting our first cell phones and laptops.
Different levels of freedom, different levels of social connection and understanding, and it breeds, as a result, a different sort of society.
THERE'S NO WAY I'd have likely become an atheist, Democrat, and literature lover the way I did or as soon as I did if I'd lived, say, in Draugnar's generation (I only use him as an example as I believe he is older...?)
All of that I got via the Internet, really:
If my knowledge of books were limited to only what I could by and what was immediate, chances are I'd have read far less by this point, and a far more limited canon at that...books and plays on YouTube as well as free audiobooks on YouTube allow me to read more and more diverse things, and consume them faster--and with all that comes a quicker pace of shifting in forming ideas and considering new opinions (after all, I couldn't read papers from LA, NY, Washington, London and Jerusalem, just for a start, if not for the Internet, I'd be limited to the local paper and LA Times on Sundays, and that'd affect my world view significantly by limiting it drastically.)
So I wouldn't have read as many books...
Read and watched and talked to the people that led me to embrace a Left-of-Center stance...
Or been able to hear Yale lectures on atheism and religion as well as Dawkins and Hitchens; Yale, Oxford, UCLA, and a great many universities offer open course mp3 audio recordings of their lectures, and I take advantage of that and download them to my iPod and listen...NO WAY I would ever hear these lectures and what they have to say without the Internet, and the more you listen to, and the more videos you watch (and online forum chats on a board game site about politics and religion, maybe?) the more your view evolves.
Old America has none of that, because it's based on a mode of living and way of thinking that's as slow and in many ways outdated in its approach and ideology as we today might consider a pre-automobile America.
Planes, Trains, and Automobiles changed the pace of life, and cities and urban centers as melting pots created a New America once before, contrasting with an older, horse-and-buggy America, and most of us can't imagine the latter lifestyle in its fullest, 19th century glory...unless you're Amish, but then, if you are, what are you doing reading this? ;)
The Internet Revolution has led to the same thing--what the car and plane was to 20th century America's cultural explosion, the laptop and smartphone are to the 21st century.
The same way cities were once the melting pot of peoples and ideas, so too are forums, boards, YouTube videos, and the like a shared venue that almost guarantees all who engage in it will cross-pollinate ideas to at least some degree; you'd have to be the most stubborn human being imaginable to never once change your viewpoint or really consider a new idea in a way you hadn't thought of before via Internet or social media exposure...everyone who goes on forums and watches such videos at least occasionally is confronted with new vantage points and views, and thus sometimes accept them.
And then there's the raw fact of immigration itself--
What the Jews, Poles, Italians, Chinese, Japanese, and so on were at the beginning of the 20th century immigrating en masse from Central and Eastern Europe as well as East Asia, so too are the Latinos, Arabs, Indians, and so on that are immigrating in such numbers right now.
There ARE two noticeable differences, there, however, and these cause a conflict between Old and New America:
1. It's ALWAYS been the case that immigrants came to be assimilated into American culture due to economic necessity and cultural pressures; even if you spoke beautifully-eloquent Italian or Mandarin, you couldn't work in America if you didn't know English, and you couldn't, to a large extent, socialize with people if you didn't give way to the dominant Protestant leanings of the nation...this is NOT the case with Latinos, however, and it's causing a heretofore unseen phenomenon in America, namely, immigrants that can immigrate here AND avoid such assimilation. So many Latinos living here speak Spanish that you CAN, feasibly, live in such a Latino-rich center like right here in LA County and not speak English well, or hardly at all, if you just want maid, construction, or other such work, chances are you can find it without learning English too well, and you'll have enough Latinos around who can speak YOUR language that it decreases the incentive to assimilate and learn this odd new language...what's more, the Catholic Church being as dominant as it is and already-established in America, Latinos don't feel the need to keep their head down, as it were, religiously, and assimilate that way, whereas my great-great-grandparents, Jews all, would've kept quiet and not spoken up about their religion in mixed company on arrival here, learning their lessons about that in Germany and Russia already. As such, the method of assimilation that has "worked" for 200+ years may not work with Latinos, and we may very well see areas like LA and Miami more permanently bilingual, though English will still unquestionably remain the language of higher commerce and subsequent generations are sure to learn it the same way I know English and not very much Yiddish at all.
2. All these previous groups, with the exception of the East Asians, were largely European, and so had at least a shared WESTERN heritage; this isn't the case with the East Asians, obviously, but as they largely occupied specific regions (San Francisco, the Pacific Northwest, some in New York) they didn't really pose a challenge to what we all "shared" (even the Jews, to an extent) to that point, namely, a shared Judeo-Christian, Western tradition of "Shakespeare, Milton and the Bible!" to quote Higgins. With Arabs, Indians, and yet more Asian immigrants, this is increasingly not the case. The Western as well as the Judeo-Christian tinge that colored Old America is now obsolete, and not universal among Americans at all. It's still a nation FOUNDED on Western ideals, but no longer one expressly of such ideals. What's more, for a country that for most of its history has traditionally identified unofficially as Protestant, an influx of Catholic Latinos, more vocal Mormons, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and now at least 10-20% of their population (much of it young) that identifies as agnostic or atheistic to some degree, the informal religious ties that bound Old America together are thoroughly severed.
Old America is a compendium of all those past tropes--White, Protestant, Western, Straight, etc.
New America is a refutation of much of that, or at least a more complex picture--White AND Black AND Latino AND Asian AND Arabic AND Indian AND so on...
Protestant AND Catholic AND Mormon AND Jewish AND Muslim AND Buddhist AND Atheist AND so on...
Western AND Eastern...
Straight AND Gay...
It's not as clearly defined as Old America, and that's how it, somewhat paradoxically, defines itself, as a COALITION and NOT as a Melting Pot of American Assimilation.
Congressional Research Service Report: Wealth Doesn't Trickle Down!
)
)
)
)
)
