“A Land of Promise Will Invariably Be a Land of Promises Unkept”

That’s not my line, I wish it was. That’s Frank Bruni, a great NYTimes columnist, writing on ‘Jan. 6 and America’s broken spirit.’ I happen to think our spirit is probably bent and stretched, but only time will tell.

But there’s much to be considered in that statement.

Throughout much of our history, most of the world has considered America as the promised land and many still do, no matter our current failings. We need to remember that. My own family’s American experiment takes my mother’s side back to the Civil War, where my grand-uncle lost an arm fighting with the Illinois militia. My mother’s job as a child was to wash his hand before dinner. On my dad’s side, his father immigrated from Canada just after that war.

Both my grandfathers were English and both grandmothers German, so the Freeman name hasn’t a long personal history in America, but the English ‘freeman’ suggests we were originally serfs tilling the land.

Immigrants to America, mostly from Europe, arrived and sheltered themselves among their kind in ghettoes where they acquainted themselves with the language and educated their children to assimilate into the working classes, with the hope of moving upward. There is something about the smell of independence that attracts those from countries where the class in which you were born is the one in which you will die. That was the promise.

Promises unkept was largely the reality.

There were always sufficient winners to keep hope alive among the losers. A basketball star here, a leading-man there and a smattering of success in small-business that became big-business was the icon that kept kids tossing newspapers to help the family stitch together a life. But for every Michael Jordan there were ten thousand black kids whose lives never rose much above abject poverty.

It’s worth remembering that in difficult political times.

America is good at boom-and-bust. We serve up a minor (sometimes major) recession on average every 5.2 years and have done so for decades. The wealthy understand these cycles and have the money to lie at anchor until another favorable breeze comes along. But it’s hard on the poor, who have no financial cushion and no control of the financial machinery that promises another job layoff just as a family is getting its legs under itself.

Which, in a nutshell, is why we got Trump.

ongs. America had a nose for Hillary Clinton’s arrogance and bad judgment and theThe Trump phenomena had its beginnings foretold in forty years of boom-and-bust, but it had its name-calling kick in when Hillary Clinton named Trump supporters the ‘deplorables.’ Let’s take a moment to parse that definition: bad; unfortunate; of very poor quality or condition; deserving severe rebuke or censure.

Really?

If you think I’m being too hard on Hillary, you’re way wrong and the fact is I’m not being nearly hard enough. There are many arguments that might have been made about the state of American politics and the various solutions for bringing political debate back into bipartisanship. None of those arguments were served by calling half the electorate deplorable and Clinton paid for that by losing an election she could have won.

And I’m not sorry it happened. America was on simmer and it had to boil over in order to right some wrongs. America had a nose for Hillary Clinton’s arrogance and bad judgment and the half of the country that had been sold down the toilet by both parties had finally had enough. The real shock was that Democrats had no idea why they had lost.

It was simple. Forty years of promises unkept.

To quote Captain Renault, played by Claude Reins, in Casablanca, “Round up the usual suspects.” The usual suspects, sheltered by Republicans and Democrats alike, were union-busting, globalization by big business, the offshoring of American industry (as well as corporate and personal profits) and the destruction of the middle class. That’s only a few of the actual suspects, the rest are enough to write a book and, come to think about it, I did.

You see, entry to the middle class was the tide that lifted all boats and greed was the anchor with which those boats were dragged under and sunk. The American Dream sank with them.

What might have been and still might be.

Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren understood that, and had plain-language solutions, but money owned the media as well as the Congress, so Bernie was ‘a socialist’ and Liz ‘would bring Wall Street down.’ So, instead we got a liar for a president, a man who lied to anyone he ever did business with and ended up lying to those who elected him, an amoral man who actually thought that lies were truth and cared for no one but himself.

But you see, money didn’t give a damn who won or lost the election because they owned both candidates, as well as the machinery of government. But the electorate—those gullible citizens we make promises to—couldn’t stand the smell of those four years. So, we got Joe, an old hand and a likable, fatherly co-conspirator.

I like Joe, but I liked Ike as well and that was a long time ago and Joe is not Ike.

Joe, as much as I liked him, is what you get when you can’t make up your mind. He took what he could from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Sanders and Warren, looked straight into the cameras and deeply into the eyes of the American people, but couldn’t sell the product. He may not have remembered what Harry Truman said about presiding within a closely contested presidency: “It’s amazing what you can get done if you don’t care who gets the credit.” But then Harry was an amazing president, pretty much unpopular in his time, but an icon today.

So, the nation will not be healed, the promises unkept will remain unkept and Joe will likely be a one-term president, most likely losing his razor thin majority in the coming mid-terms and drifting back into relative obscurity. I’m sorry, Joe, it’s really not your fault and you deserve better but you were just the wrong guy and we all pretty much knew it at the time.

As to what still might be.

It would be a start if we stopped calling each other names. A nation is much like a marriage and one thing you learn pretty quickly in a marriage is to never say something you can’t unsay. Conservatives are not all idiots, trying to control elections and destroy the republic. Liberals are not all squeamish do-gooders who will break the bank and open our borders.

What we have in common is being victims of a conspiracy-theory driven internet that amplifies loud voices considerably beyond their value. Too much shouting ‘fire’ in a crowded theater. The media is liable for a great deal of this national dis-temperament because conspiracy-theories are a cheap source that attracts eyeballs and eyeballs convert to money. Most of life has always been about money and likely always will be. That’s why we have so many politicians and so few statesmen (and stateswomen)

What we also have in common is our vulnerability to all those messy little details itemized above that trashed our middle class. We need it back. Please, all you radicals on the left and right, get together, put a hand on each other’s shoulders and instead of giving us a civil war or more confrontation, give us back our middle class.

It is, has always been and will remain (if we save it) the foundation of a free and prosperous America. But it all begins with giving a shit about unkept promises. Shake hands with each other and give a shit.

You’ll be glad you did.