Our Government Is Broken – Why I Choose to Walk Down the Middle of a Very Dangerous Road

I’m the stay-at-home-mom of 3 kids – 2 of whom have special needs. I’m not a politician, a lobbyist, a church or a corporation. I am a citizen of the United States of America.

Lately it seems to me that our country is on a downward spiral, whipping around out of control as if being sucked into a black hole. The centrifugal force has resulted in a very frightening polarization of our government and our people.

My contacts on social media have turned my homepage into an unending barrage of propaganda highlighting every misstep made by government officials, corporations or religious/non-religious groups. Politics have become a team sport, citizens are taking sides and the competition is fierce.

We all look upon the same big picture (like the one above), but we see what we want to see… or what those people we trust want us to see. Then, as a country, we argue over whether that big picture depicts a young woman or an old woman. We take sides and pick teams and our teams become so focused on winning the argument game that the individuals on the teams either refuse to see the whole picture or lose the courage to step forward and say that the claims of both sides have validity.

Perhaps it is because as a country we developed on a capitalist foundation that we have become so competitive. Initially this competitive nature allowed us to build and grow, and become an independent nation. Now that our nation has grown and flourished, what is this internal competition doing to it?

Aren’t we supposed to be the United States of America? Doesn’t that very word insinuate we are all on the same team? "United we stand, divided we fall." The concept is not new. In fact, the above phrase is attributed to the ancient Greek, Aesop, so clearly it has been around for longer than our own great (or not-so-great) nation.

We have touted ourselves as the greatest nation on earth, have we not? Perhaps that was once true, but I for one don’t believe that we are all that great any more. In fact, the more I read about our current lawmakers, the less faith I have in our government. And I don’t think I am the only one.

I was raised by Republican parents. They raised me to believe that if I got a good education, worked hard and invested my resources properly, I would live long and prosper. (What can I say? My father was in the aerospace industry – so apparently I’m at least part Vulcan.) In effect, I was raised with a strong team affiliation.

Yet in my adult life I have learned the hard way that there is more to the picture than what I was raised to see. Both my husband and I were working full-time. We were paying mortgage on a house and were always up-to-date on our car payments and bills. Then our youngest was born 10 weeks prematurely with Down syndrome. Our health insurance only covered certain parts of the vast pile of medical bills. Our baby came home with a feeding tube and could not be put into a standard day care. We would have to spend our own money to pay for a nurse to care for her while I was at work… but unfortunately nurses made a higher hourly wage than I did. I had to stop working to take care of our child. We lost our house, our cars and the lifestyle we had built on a foundation of Republican dogma. 

Is it not ironic? Though my personal views are against abortion, I can still look from the middle of the road and see that the very same “team” that says that abortion is wrong is against giving handouts to those in need. After some really good plays, our contribution to the team went virtually unnoticed and my family was benched. Suddenly the rest of the picture became very, very clear. 

Although I went to a high school with Catholic affiliation, I was raised with science – my parents taught me to listen with my ears, see with my eyes and utilize my brain to make sense of the input. It was from a very early age I felt that the things I was seeing and the things I was being told to believe weren’t adding up to the picture before me.

I was taught in school that the United States of America was founded upon Christian values. I also learned that many of the first people to settle in North America did so for religious freedom. (This does not include the Native Americans who were living here long before the continent was “discovered” by some rather narcissistic Europeans – men that apparently believed that nothing aside from their own atrophied universe existed until they themselves noticed and validated it. Let us remember that these very same men believed the earth to be flat until not too terribly long before “discovering” North America… but I digress… badly…)

Religious freedom was so important to the people colonizing North America, in fact, that when the Constitution was penned by our founding fathers, the very first Amendment they included stated:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”

And yet are religious issues not now cause for some of our biggest arguments? For example, only certain people are legally allowed to marry in our country because Christianity forbids otherwise. Yet not every legal citizen of the United States of America is a Christian, and many Christians disagree with disallowing same-sex unions. Wouldn’t that in and of itself be an infringement upon the free exercise of religion? 

Later along the way, science taught me the value of survival of the fittest. Only those who are the strongest thrive while the weak die out. There are those in our society that tout eugenics – the use of science to weed out humans/fetuses with inferior genes and preventing the reproduction or birth of those individuals. See this Link.

There are people that believe my youngest daughter does not have the same value as other human beings. In fact a whopping 92 percent of people choose to terminate pregnancies when they learn their fetus has Down syndrome… and yet I look with my eyes – I listen with my ears and I see how smart and witty my youngest is. While there are many in our country who choose not to work – who choose to collect unemployment and food stamps, I would bet everything that I (still) have that my daughter with Down syndrome will have a good job some day and earn her own way. 

So who is right? Should we prevent the abortions of fetuses that will be born to unemployed, drug abusing parents who will neither have the money to feed them properly or the wherewithal to teach these children the value of working for a living while we devalue the lives of individuals with special needs who will quite possibly someday be self-sufficient with proper education? Should we claim that all life has value, yet refuse to help those born to more difficult circumstances or should we abort them all in hopes of creating a more perfect society filled with “perfect” individuals?

And with these words, a gauntlet has been thrown and yet another game of semantics begins. People will take sides and argue their personal, political and religious views. Who will win? Or will we as a country allow our variety or views and ideologies to tear our great country apart? 

“It’s a vase!”

“No! It’s two faces!”

So what do we do about our country’s gross polarization? Of our individual refusal to see the whole picture? Of our national insistence of taking sides and competing against ourselves?

Perhaps it’s time to find the “I” in “Team.” Or perhaps it’s time to quit the team altogether. Perhaps it’s time to combine the team into one great country.

After all… whose side are YOU on?