Despite the fact that the stock market in America is at record highs and the unemployment rate, which began its substantial decline during the administration of former United States president Barack Obama, is now at record lows, Americans spend their days haunted by the gnawing sense that life has spun out of control.
In recent weeks, hurricanes have devastated islands in the Caribbean, parts of Texas and Louisiana, and most of Puerto Rico. Then came the horrific mass murder in Las Vegas. And now, monstrous fires are ravaging northern California.
It’s always difficult to wrap your brain around any individual tragedy, but when they come by the handful in rapid succession, it becomes impossible to ingest nightmares upon nightmares.
The scenes of burned out blocks in Santa Rosa and reports of the fire’s ever-rising death toll, prove to be only a momentary distraction before our minds switch to what’s happening in San Juan where 85 per cent of the island of 3.7 million souls is still without electricity and drinkable water. Tragically, hurricane-ravaged Houston has been all but forgotten as it struggles to recover from lives lost, homes gone and huge areas still unliveable.
Las Vegas is another story, entirely. It is a man-made horror. Despite the exceptional magnitude of this massacre, we appear to refuse to come to grips with the reality that mass shootings are a daily affair in the US. The New York Times recently produced a chart from Orlando to Las Vegas: 477 days, 521 mass shootings, with 527 killed and 2,156 wounded.
With all these horrors being visited upon America — both acts of nature or man-made tragedies — a sense of dread has set in. It’s as if people in America wake up each day “waiting for the other shoe to drop”.
If all of this weren’t bad enough, more often than not, American politics and government also appear to be out of control. Hyper-partisanship has created such dysfunction that Congress simply can’t act to address the nation’s agenda. Health care remains in limbo, 700,000 Dreamers face an uncertain future. There is no real prospect for comprehensive immigration reform or the long-promised investments to repair America’s crumbling infrastructure. And, in all likelihood, this session will end with Congress once again failing to pass a budget.
For his part, President Donald Trump appears more obsessed with undoing whatever his predecessor had done with little concern for the consequences of his actions or his words. Last week, alone, his administration took executive actions to erase critical Obama-era environmental regulations and make significant changes that severely weaken health insurance guidelines and threaten the well-being of the poor and the disabled.
And then there are his tweets. In past administrations, when we faced unsettling tragedy or saw the world in chaos, presidents would act to bring us together and try to restore our confidence. Past presidents have played the role of comforters-in-chief, helping Americans heal their divisions or their wounds and restore faith in the American national purpose. But not this president. Trump was elected with the promise that he would “shake things up”, but he doesn’t appear to understand the truth in the old maxim “there’s a time and place for everything”. And so, when Americans are already reeling from several calamities, he chooses to unsettle them further with provocative words or actions, the impact of which drive some to the brink of despair.
Each morning, I check Twitter to see what new insults or threats the president has hurled at foreign leaders or domestic opponents. Last week alone, with gleeful abandon, Trump has threatened North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un, tried to humiliate the Republican Chair of the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee, insulted and threatened leaders in suffering Puerto Rico, and challenged NBC News network’s licence to broadcast.
Apart from North Korea, I haven’t mentioned the other multiple crises America faces overseas — from the continuing nightmare of Syria, with its hundreds of thousands of dead and millions of refugees, to the humanitarian crisis that is Yemen, and the increasingly insolvable Israel-Palestine conflict. Added to that, there is an emboldened Iran and the unpredictable impact of the Trump administration’s recent threat to upend the nuclear deal; an empowered China flexing its muscles regionally and internationally; an aggressive and emboldened Russia; and America’s fraying relations with Europe.
It is becoming increasingly difficult to discern exactly where the US stands on any issue that matters, or how decisions are made. What we are left with are tweets — and that only compounds our sense that we’re adrift in troubled waters.
With the world in chaos and feeling out of control, and with American politics and its Congress and president only contributing to the national anxiety, it is imperative that Americans do not surrender to despair. They must work to pull themselves together. They need a revival of national unity by insisting on civil discourse with their opponents and adversaries. Americans must develop a national agenda that restores their purpose, cares for the people, and gives hope to those who feel left behind and have lost faith in Americans’ ability to live up to the promise of their country. And we must provide clear-headed direction in foreign policy that will guide America’s relations with other nations.
It will be a heady task, with a long road ahead, but it is a challenge America dare not ignore. Too much, including the country’s collective sanity, is at stake.
Dr James J. Zogby is the president of Arab American Institute.
