Americans Used to Be Proud of Our Country. What Went Wrong? | Opinion

The United States is a mess.

Yes, this place has always been a mess, but from the days of its bloody and genocidal founding until the 20th century, America typically found a way to simultaneously be violent, racist and sexist while also at least attempting to solve some of its deepest systemic issues. For whatever reason, we're just not there anymore. We're stuck. And what's left is a place that has increasingly rare flashes of brilliance with a much more predictable and exhausting cycle of violence, bigotry and something akin to a complete inability to fix the hard problems that the majority of Americans actually want to see solved.

Many years ago I started noticing just how much this place wore down my family, friends and community. We're here. We give this place all we've got. We damn sure make it better, but over and over again, this country makes it clear that it loves Black culture, but not Black people. And so we march and fight for deep reform and change. It barely even trickles out. And on most days it seems like we take one step forward and two or three steps back for us on policing, mass incarceration, poverty, education, violence, and more. And at first I thought this pattern had everything to do with America's love affair with racism. Don't get me wrong, this place is still racist AF, but as my own circle and community grew over the past 10 years, what I realized was that serious systemic change wasn't just nearly non-existent for us, it was that way for almost everybody.

Tens of millions of children, including my own, marched and protested and organized against gun violence after shootings slaughtered tens of thousands of kids, and hundreds of thousands of adults from coast to coast—so much so that gun violence is now the single leading cause of death for young people. 40,0000+ people a year are shot and killed here while other developed countries don't even have 100 shooting deaths a year. We have that many every single day! But the problem is just as atrocious today as it was last year, or ten years ago. In the land of thoughts and prayers, meaningful actions and change are hard to find.

Nearly every credible scientist in the world is screaming from the rooftops that the pollution and waste from the 8 billion people of the world is causing a very real climate crisis. Of course it is. It's common sense. And again, hundreds of millions of kids and families, including my own, marched and protested and demonstrated, begging the leaders of the world to make a radical course correction, but a radical course correction just doesn't seem to be in America's cards.

I could repeat this story for the end of police violence and misconduct, for women's rights, for the drastic reduction of mass incarceration, for universal health care, for reproductive rights, for a $15 minimum wage and a dozen other serious issues that the majority of Americans actually agree on.

Almost the entire developed world and even a growing part of the developing world has universal education all the way through college—with little to no existence of student loans. We could do this. Almost every American ally has done this for generations. It's not socialism or communism. It's just a smart use of tax dollars. Instead, Americans, including myself, my wife, and now my kids, have an astounding $1.6 trillion dollars in student loan debt. It's staggering.

I recently had to change my health insurance plan. Nine adults and children depend on me for their health insurance. I chose the best plan I could afford and the co-pays and deductibles and premiums are still completely outrageous. Again, almost the entire developed world has universal health care for all people. Most of my friends around the world don't even understand deductibles and premiums when I try to explain them because for them it's all covered. We could do that here, but our country has chosen profits over people.

A dear friend of mine, a well-known journalist, recently traveled to South Korea and remarked how on the subway, for the first time in a long time, she didn't have any fears about being pushed onto the tracks. It wasn't because no threats exist there, but in South Korea, again like so much of the world, the train tracks are all covered by protective glass barriers that open up only when the train arrives. The technology isn't even new. It's decades old. But America's trains and train systems are literal antiques—with little advancement over the past 100 years. It's shameful.

We're not the best country in the world. I wish we were. We're not the happiest. We're not the safest. We're not the cleanest. Our educational systems are not the best. In most of those metrics we don't even crack the top 20. And instead of putting our heads down and actually solving our hardest problems, we're stuck in a continuous loop of Democrats and Republicans that have small visions and small results.

It goes beyond party. It gets to the very fabric and identity of this place. We are stuck in a malaise of mediocrity and have been for a very long time. And while our nation refuses to substantively address and correct its most pressing problems, we're basically at each other's throats day in and day out. I wish I saw change on the horizon. We need it, but I don't even know if it's coming any time soon.