Published on Syracuse.com on April 30th, 2025
We are America. We have taken our place among the world’s nations seriously. We understood our blessings, our freedoms, our quest for equal rights, even our affluence. We accepted that our blessings might require us to be compassionate, to share the products of our research, our educational advantages, our way of life with people who were poorer, or oppressed.
Now we are choosing to join the oppressed. We offered hope to so many, now we will join the hopeless. We will give up our hegemony rather than share it in a multipolar world. We will isolate and fleece our allies because the alliances we once thought of as protection from war and destruction, we are now supposed to think of as dens of thieves.
We will no longer help feed the hungry or give medical assistance to less blessed nations. We don’t believe that some of the poorest nations on earth are made poorer by climate changes. We now seem to think that if people can’t take care of themselves, then, oh well, they will die. We have forgotten that everything in this life is interconnected and that woes we ignore in one corner of the globe could very well affect our corner of the globe given time.
We are embracing the meanest of leaders to fulfill the adage: keep your friends close, but your enemies closer. We are embracing the rules of the mafia. We are becoming a fascist state, and many Americans seem to embrace this as a kind of “tough love.” Have we been bad? Do we need to be punished?
Does a nation have a soul? If we did, we are losing it now, and it feels awful. We need our democracy to give us back the ease of mind we once had, the agreement that we would at least try to make humans humane.
We the people no longer have a government. Government is cutting us loose to sink or swim on our own.
Nancy Brisson
Liverpool, NY
Nancy writes a newsletter on Substack where you can read more at https://nancybrisson.substack.com/