Are you better off than you were four years ago? Statistically speaking:
- The US unemployment rate climbed from 4.7% to 6.7%.
- The country’s deficit spending steadily increased each year before understandably ballooning this year [http://bit.ly/DeficitTrends]
- Our national debt rose $7.8 trillion dollars in 4 years compared to $8.59 trillion in the 8 years prior [http://bit.ly/WeHave27TrillionProblems]; and
- Since March, at least 400,000 more Americans have died than would have in a normal year [http://bit.ly/ExcessUSDeaths].
It doesn’t look good.
But, but, of course the unemployment rate and deficit spending increased! COVID-19, baby! Blame COVID!
Fair enough, but consider that, after adjusting for population size, US deaths this year were more than 85% higher than in Germany. 81% higher than in Canada. 28% higher than in France [http://bit.ly/MakeAmericaGreatAtDying]. Sure, UK had it worse but give them a little slack. They’re a sardine-can of a country with 725 people packed in per square mile (compared to 87 people per square mile in the US) [http://bit.ly/YouAreMyDensity].
So blame COVID, yes, but maybe it didn’t have to be this bad? Maybe the person leading our country could have led differently? Seriously, if Justin Trudeau were our leader and we had the same rate of death per million people as Canada, 237,800 more Americans would be alive today [http://bit.ly/BlameUS]. I’m going to spell it out and change the color for emphasis (and to pad my word count): TWO HUNDRED THIRTY-SEVEN THOUSAND EIGHT HUNDRED!
That’s a lot of grandparents comically trying to figure out how to Zoom with their grandchildren. It’s the mother who never got to hold her newborn. It’s the husband who texted his wife from the quarantined bedroom to say he was struggling to breathe. It’s the Angel from Montgomery. Hell, it’s Herman Cain.
So it goes.
When you are cavalier with death, you’ll be familiar with it, too. And now we’re all familiar with it. And in some ways, that’s not the worst of it.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg once opined that “the true symbol of the United States is not the bald eagle. It is the pendulum. And when the pendulum swings too far in one direction, it will go back.”
Two weeks ago, we saw the pendulum swinging at full force. Rioters attempted to lay siege to the Capitol because, for four years, the most powerful person in the world fed them a steady diet of misinformation, conspiracy theories, nationalist intolerance of “other,” distrust of journalists, and a propensity for hate, and then encouraged them to walk to the Capitol and “fight like hell” because “if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore” [http://bit.ly/TrumpSpeechTranscriptGrossDontClick].
Was this the amplitude of the pendulum? We can hope. But the damage has already been done. And this was not the only riot of the last 4 years [http://bit.ly/OhPleaseDontEquateCapitolSiegeWithBLM]. Because this most powerful person in the world had helped launch what Leslie Odom, Jr described as:
“A rebirth of a nation’s hatred.
Red, white, and blue.
Is black in there, too?”
We were never out of the racism woods to begin with—it’d be #fakenews to say otherwise—but these last four years, and this most powerful person in the world who built his campaign of fear based on racist birther and Barack HUSSEIN Obama conspiracies (emphasis most clearly not mine) have erased decades of progress. Racism was always the hidden underbelly of our country. The most powerful person in the world just decided to embrace and cultivate it.
So are you better off than you were 4 years ago?
No. But look on the bright side.
Facts may be cool again. The Nostradamus-wannabe QAnon is muffled and so, too, is the outgoing commander in chief. People are quoting Martin Luther King, Jr. (Oh, wait, that was just a one day thing? And they still hate Colin Kaepernick? Never mind.)
Most importantly, today, our nation’s children look up to the second most powerful person in the world and see a woman of color and a hint of HOPE again. And they look up to to the most powerful person in the world and see … maybe not the best this country has to offer but, for the first time in four years, they’re also not seeing the worst.
So maybe you’ll be better off tomorrow than you were today.
It’s a start.
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