Why are Americans so damn scared? We are building a wall to seal ourselves off from a friendly neighbor, forgetting how Ronald Reagan mocked and excoriated another attempt in the past to separate people by dividing them by force with a wall.
We have turned Emma Lazarus’ poetic words inscribed on the base of the Statue of Liberty – “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” – 180 degrees.
Now we are telling the victims of injustice in the rest of the world, who have heard and believed in America’s promise of freedom and opportunity, to keep out, don’t bother to knock, just go away.
Our airwaves are rife with ads for security systems, as if our homes are being constantly threatened by hordes of outlaws and brigands. We arm ourselves as if we are living in Afghanistan, Iraq or Syria, and carry loaded pistols in classrooms, restaurants and churches.
Our police dress up like soldiers, clad in body armor, packing assault rifles and riding around in military vehicles designed for all-out combat in order to serve warrants for the sale of $20 worth of drugs.
I just don’t get it. Having experienced actual anarchy and violence in Iraq and Afghanistan, I just don’t feel the need to be “protected” in this most peaceable of lands. Still, something is striking panic into the hearts of millions of my fellow Americans, and it’s vitally important to figure out what that “something” really is. It’s something that politicians on the right and left never even mention, giving demagogues free rein to terrify us with phantom enemies and imaginary foes.
Quite simply, it is the inexorable flood of cybernetics, robotics and automation that is in the process of making enormous numbers of us unnecessary, redundant and without a place in this brave new world we are finding ourselves in.
There are never going to be masses of new opportunities for skilled and semi-skilled workers in the manufacturing sector, and ditto for the energy business – whether it continues to focus on extracting fuel sources from the earth or “greens” itself with power from the sun, wind or tides.
Every time you hear of a new “labor-saving” gadget that promises to give you more free time, think of it on a giant scale, where “labor-saving” translates into unemployment, rust belts and futile trade wars.
The fact is, countries all over the world are struggling with the same dilemma. China’s factory workers, who haven’t yet been put out of work by automation, have to stand by and watch as jobs like theirs migrate to even cheaper sources of labor like Southeast Asia. We are all in the same fix, a fix that no one has yet solved.
The world may experience mini-booms in the future triggered by the exploitation of new energy sources like fracking old oil fields or mining Canada’s tar sands, but the new sources are increasingly poisonous to the environment as well as being easily exhausted, like all geological resources. They are also insanely short-sighted. For instance, Canada’s most precious resource is its immense volume of fresh water, yet industry threatens to pollute it to squeeze a few years’ worth of fossil fuels out of the adjoining land.
I think Americans sense what is happening, but rather than admit it, they do battle with straw dogs and shadows. The point is, if the American Dream means every generation should be better off than the last, that dream is dead for most of us.
If it means what it is supposed to mean – that everyone here has the same opportunity to improve our lives and that the opportunity benefits us all – then it need not perish.
But the future is not going to be easy, and there is no escaping it. We are tied to the rest of the world and, like it or not, all the walls and wars and immigration laws you can imagine are not going to change that.
In fact, living up to the promise on the Statue of Liberty is our only hope. We have prospered in the past because the most ambitious, hard-working and inventive people in the world have immigrated here, drawn by the promise of tolerance, freedom and social mobility.
If we want to preserve our well-being, our ideals will turn out to be our most important resource. A “Fortress America” has no future in the real world; clinging to an imaginary past and defending that illusion tooth and nail is the road to ruin.
Rob Schultheis has covered Afghanistan since 1984 for Time, CBS, NPR and The New York Times. He also writes about climbing, the arts and environment from his home in Telluride, where he has lived since 1973. Schultheis has written seven books, including Waging Peace, based on his year with the 425th Civil Affairs Battalion (Airborne) in Baghdad.