Celebrating the “Glorious Fourth” sounds increasingly ironic. Everyone these days feels increasingly victimized, in spite of living a better life than anyone ever has in the past. Folks marinate in simmering resentment dawn to dusk, only briefly cheerful as the fireworks explode.
Most likely, that is due to the expansion of the idea of “meritocracy” towards the end of the previous century. We always knew that some people were better than others at some things. The poison was the increasing belief that such success was always the result of hard work, as opposed to luck and circumstance. Kings, after all, had been mysteriously selected by God, regardless of mundane qualifications. An aura of intrinsic value concentrated on one’s absolute amount of wealth.
Well, most people work hard. And most people do not become the best. Obviously, by meritocratic belief, such folks deserve their fate. But equally obviously those folks know how hard they tried. So someone or something else must be to blame.
Self-described victims find reinforcement in “their” newspapers, or television channels, or social media networks. They are reinforced by all those worthy institutions catering to extremes to increase advertising dollars. And the tone shifts from “glorious” to “apocalyptic”.
We were patriotic when I grew up in the ’50s. The country had just won a great war. Those times seem golden in retrospect, but only against a background of what had gone before _ depression, war and all.
Today, life could indeed seem glorious. But we squander the opportunity and prefer to cultivate our sullen anger.
HuntingtonHarborThoughts 