America Has Become a Toxic Society

There was a time in living memory when people respected teachers and didn’t worry about trusting their kids with them. When the mainstream media was center-left but made enough of a good-faith effort to come across as neutral that people generally thought they tried to be honest. When TV shows and movies seemed to reinforce classic American values. When no one worried about government agencies “going woke.” When race relations in America seemed to have improved. When it seemed very doable to get the deficit under control. When our government seemed to still be inferior to the market, but at least seemed to have some low, basic level of competence. When the Internet seemed to be a great place to find new websites, meet new friends, and generally seemed like an enormous plus with few minuses other than taking up too much time. Then, there was sports.

Do you remember watching basketball in the Larry Bird/Magic Johnson/Michael Jordan era? That limited period of history where Bird and Johnson had revolutionized the game and Jordan was just starting to come into his own and do the same? It was a really fun time for sports. Why? Well, you start to get the gist of it if you watch this classic McDonald’s commercial:

Back then, sports brought people together. You might be a diehard Bird, Johnson, or Jordan guy, but you at least respected how good the other guys were and enjoyed just being entertained and being able to forget about politics for a while. Back then, outside of a few exceptions, athletes stayed out of politics. Remember when Jordan was asked to get involved in the Jesse Helms vs. Harvey Gantt senate race in North Carolina, he chipped into Gantt’s campaign but declined to do a PSA for him and said:

Carl von Clausewitz famously said, "War is simply the continuation of political intercourse with the addition of other means." When you take a side in that war, you quite naturally make a large number of enemies.

Athletes and entertainers used to understand that. Today, it has gone so far in the other direction that Disneyland chose to pick a fight with Republicans in a Republican-dominated state while the Los Angeles Dodgers have made a point of publicly celebrating an explicitly anti-Christian group.

Today, if you’re a Republican, the NFL wants you to know that they hate you. The Dodgers? They hate you. LeBron James? He hates you. The actors at the Emmys? They hate you. Target? That company hates you. Gillette, Walt Disney, Bud Light? They HATE you.

In every case, the individuals and corporations made a public show of letting Republicans know that they hate them. This was not for some moral reason or because Republicans were their natural enemies, it’s just incredibly cynical marketing. They want you to know that they hate you because they think they might net some marginal number of fans or sales out of the whole process.

If you don’t understand, let me point you back to the athletes over the last few years that made a point of kneeling for the American flag. Obviously, this was incredibly divisive and at this late date, you might look back and say, “Those tactics didn’t even accomplish anything.” By the standards of conventional activism, that is true, but by the toxic standards of modern activism, they were a smashing success. You see, modern activism usually isn’t about accomplishing anything, it’s just about drawing attention and branding:

In one sense, (kneeling for the flag) was one of the most brilliant protest tactics of all time, not just because it created so much buzz, but because the right people loved it and the right people hated it. The very fact that conservatives got so angry at people like Colin Kaepernick and Megan Rapinoe made them rock stars on the Left. On the other hand, if the goal was actually to accomplish anything, kneeling was one of the stupidest protest tactics of all time because it turned half the country against the group and created a years-long battle over the TACTIC, not the cause. …Sure, there are still narcissistic athletes kneeling, but are they trying to accomplish anything (if so, what is it supposed to be?) or just trying to shine a spotlight on themselves? If the tactic had been literally flashing their asses at the crowd, the exact same athletes would have been doing it for the exact same reason, none of which have anything at all to do with “black lives.” In some cases, black bank accounts maybe, but not “black lives.”

Increasingly, this is the kind of mentality that is destroying America.

It’s not “How do we win?” It’s “How do I win at your expense?” It’s not, “How can we make the country better?” It’s “How can increase my status with the group I care about at the expense of the group we don’t like?” It’s not “How do I become successful?” It’s how “How can I squeeze out the last few drops of success, even if it hurts other people in the process?”

There’s nothing wrong with competition or success, but there is something wrong with dividing Americans into ever smaller groups and trying to set them against each other because you think it will benefit you. There is something wrong with lying, being willfully cruel, unethical, or taking a “the ends justify the means” approach to life.

Some things are supposed to be more important than that. At a minimum, your family, friends, country, God, and even your honor. If you abandon being a good person because you think it will make you more successful, you’ll ultimately only find that it makes any success you do have bitter and empty.

Do you know why people used to say don’t discuss politics, religion, or race? Because they’re inherently divisive topics and the more you insert them into things, like Disney Land, Major League Baseball, and the NFL, the more strife you’re going to create. The more you set up a culture where people are rewarded for tearing others down than building them up, the less you can trust other people. The more tribal a society becomes; the less people can rely on anyone outside of their tribe and the more corrupt supposedly neutral agencies like the military and FBI become.

Politics is being pushed into EVERYTHING. Entertainment, culture, schools, sports, corporations, entertainment, and the mainstream media. It’s hard to escape it and makes you wonder if politics today is more toxic than it has ever been. That’s hard to say given that we’ve had a Civil War, the Reconstruction era, veered into what could be called “quasi-fascist” behavior during WW1, and suffered through the Vietnam era in the sixties. However, is this era at least roughly comparable to those worst periods in American history? Absolutely.

People have always launched a lot of anger and hatred toward politicians, but we’ve now reached a point where the Left hates the Founding Fathers, the country, and commonly refers to everyone who doesn’t go along with them as Nazis and white supremacists. Twenty years ago, the idea that liberals would put people on cattle cars and ship them off to camps if they could get away with it was a bad joke. Today, it seems like something that would be entirely plausible if Americans were ever foolish enough to allow themselves to be disarmed.

This sort of hatred doesn’t arise out of a vacuum. It’s pushed by politicians and activist groups, promoted by the mainstream media, and pushed into the mainstream consciousness by social media algorithms written by far-left-wing programmers.

Meanwhile, mental illness is soaring, racial resentments are rising, crime is going up, cooperation between the parties is almost at a standstill and the country is on the Highway to Hell while few efforts are being made to turn things around.

We could come up with all sorts of ways to theoretically turn it around, but so much of it just comes down to things like traditional American values, patriotism, Christianity rising again, successful marriages, wanting to set a good example, and learning to respect, cooperate and trust each other again. How does a degenerate country that has abandoned so much of what made it successful get back to its roots? There doesn’t seem to be an easy answer to that besides a hefty dose of ruin, tragedy, and disaster that opens people’s eyes. Countries, like human beings, often find it extremely difficult to make big changes until they face some sort of terrible tragedy caused by their own foolishness. They hit rock bottom, realize something has to change, and start making happen.

Unfortunately, that’s where America is today. Drifting towards a self-created disaster of our own making with little hope of turning things around in the interim. A toxic country with a toxic culture, waiting for its comeuppance so it can finally remember what made it great in the first place.

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