Downsizing Our U.S.A.

Several years ago my wife and I downsized our home, discarding many things that had been ours for decades. We were moving into a smaller home, appropriate to our age and abilities. Such downsizing is a common practice for our generation.

Today’s Republican Party is leading our United States into downsizing, even though we are not old as nations go. We are shedding much of what we have picked up during the last two and a half centuries, even some of what we claimed was ours at our founding.

Republicans under Donald Trump seem to think our country is weary of its life, and no longer able to muster the energy to imagine and live beyond the present moment.

Have we tired of the rule of law, and the equality of all people before that law? Does it take too much energy to respect one another and appropriately constituted authority? Are we weary of protecting religious pluralism, and of encouraging the unfettered search for truth in science and the humanities? Are we so shriveled inside our thin skins that we cannot tolerate diversity of personal expression and artistic experimentation? Does age-related ringing in our ears make it hard for us to sort out political tensions as they are reported to us by a free and responsible press?

The Republican right legislates and budgets as if we no longer have the resources to assure basic necessities of life for our poor, or health care for our sick, or opportunities for those who have long been excluded.

The party of the right downsizes our understanding of who we are when it denigrates the millions of us who are not of European heritage. If it cannot deport them, it can and will end programs and policies that might allow them to participate fully in our economic and social abundance. It is as if we tried that kind of idealistic thing when we were young, but now we are old, and we really don’t care any longer about anyone but us and our kind.

We shrink back from the rest of the world, and forego long-established treaties and alliances, often in favor of regimes the likes of which the United States has spent the last 80 years resisting. Relationships of mutual trust are bullied into transactional deals, reducing ourselves to one more player among many. It was hard work being the leader we once were; let someone else take the reins.

We abandon our history by insisting its telling be scrubbed of anything that does not make us look good—like a funeral elegy in which it is not polite to tell the whole truth.

When my wife and I downsized our possessions, we did not give up who we are at heart. But that is what is happening to our country under this administration and its enablers. An impoverished hard-right leadership is trashing the very things that have made us a truly great nation, casting aside values and promises that can never be reclaimed or restored. Loud boasting about our greatness will never regain what we have given up.

Our republic does not have to end this way. We can challenge the agents of our downsizing by renewing our commitment to what made the world take notice of us in the first place—our love of liberty and justice for all. Each of us can choose at least one ideal, practice, or person to stand up for in public. We can send the naysayers on the right packing, and reclaim our heart.

Independence Day, 2025

On national holidays I plant two 12 by 18-inch Americans flags in amongst the flowers in front of our house. I will plant them tomorrow morning, on the Fourth of July, our Independence Day, 2025. But it won’t be easy.

I know: some Americans are celebrating where the Republican administration and congress and, I feel, Supreme Court are leading us. But I am among the dissenters who disapprove of where we are being taken, who feel it is a betrayal of the best of our values, ideals, and practice of self-government. So I am tempted not to fly our flag tomorrow.

But I am not going to do that. In part because, I would not have liked it had someone done the same, for example, when the Democrats were in positions to govern. But more importantly, because I am an American and I want everyone to know it.

I have a claim on and stake in this nation, and honestly believe we can do better—much better—for the good of all of us than does the law the President will sign tomorrow. I will continue to make my aspirations for our nation known as long as I am able. 

Tomorrow we celebrate the 249th birthday of our nation. But we were not really free to be that nation until several years later after a bloody war. It took a fight not only to liberate us from Great Britain’s rule, but also to be free to constitute a nation whose government, as Abraham Lincoln famously put it, would be of the PEOPLE, by the PEOPLE, and for the PEOPLE! 

In the end, I will plant my flags tomorrow for you and for me and for all of us people, and in the fervent hope that one day, the people willing, we will once again aspire to be a nation where life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are real possibilities for us all.

The good old days of working together

This afternoon, while our U.S. Senators squabbled in Washington, I rode my bicycle along 13.5 miles of the towpath trail in our wonderful Cuyahoga Valley National Park. It was a beautiful day, and I was deeply thankful I was here rather than there.

CVNP was created out of mostly privately-owned land through the joint efforts of Republicans and Democrats some 50 years ago. (It was the Cuyahoga Valley National Recreation Area at first.) If this land had not been protected by our Federal Government, today it would no doubt be packed with as many homes, businesses, and perhaps even factories as its rugged terrain could bear, all tied together by endless strands of concrete and asphalt. Instead, it is 33,000 acres of natural beauty stretching between Cleveland and Akron, offering easy escape to some sense of wildness to millions of people.

I could not help but wonder if such cooperation as created our park would be at all possible today. Frankly, I doubt it. Seemingly gone forever are politicians who want to work together for the honest public good, not for who can gain or exploit what from whom.

Cuyahoga Valley National Park could not happen today. Who knows when someone will find an excuse to undermine it, given the trajectory we are on? It's one more reason I shudder for our nation's future.