We unite under a flag of what we want to change, but won’t take responsibility to change
Can gas prices be lowered? What’s to be done about global warming? Should taxes be raised? The paradox is that we as Americans have continued our philosophies of asking too much from government but remain unwilling to help answer these demands, shifting the burden to someone else. This, combined with our desire to satisfy our consumerist wants and our desire to maintain the “status quo,” is the bedrock of what is becoming America’s new values and identity.
No radical solution or policy initiative can address these paradoxes well. Hence, it is worth considering the direction of the nation with these emerging values. In any society, values become part of national identity.
I will admit that I have fallen into this trap of demanding the government to do more than I would be willing to sacrifice. As college students, we’re already poor enough to even consider raising our own taxes, tuition, or to see cuts in the very things that have made our college life as comfortable as possible.
Yet, as we become better educated voting citizens, any major sacrifice the government would even try to make will meet a resounding “no,” in defense of our free-market, free-choices system. As we continue in the war on terror and our efforts to stabilize Iraq and the Middle East, the costs continue to rise and America is still chastised everywhere. But Washington understands the majority of us are unwilling to make that sacrifice, so we can rest assured we’ll be okay.
If you didn’t see Harrisonburg’s Wal-Mart a month ago, the brown, red and orange livery was absent. Instead, it was filled with green, red and white. Christmas shopping somehow arrived earlier this year as retailers nationwide decided to satisfy consumer demands and get a competitive edge by having earlier sales while consumers stress over Christmas spending and things that need to be done. We refuse to tolerate the terrible state of our airlines and air transport system, and of course, gas prices are always an intolerable inconvenience.
Finally, we don’t really like change coming rapidly in all respects. Which is why the negative “changes” that terrorists desire to wreak on our way of life are dealt with abroad instead of here at home, because the opposite would mean a larger and meaner Patriot Act that perhaps would make new Canadian citizens.
Even in Washington, changes in government to respond to the threats of terrorism are met with resistance because bureaucracies refuse to surrender turf control, and much-needed bureaucrats in departments like Homeland Security leave for more lucrative opportunities. American workers are not so keen to accept the fact that job outsourcing will continue as a norm for the economy. Yet members of Congress earn pay rasies more easily than the rest of us.
Well, this is generally the way we’d like things to be: cheaper gas, less taxes, more pay, less delay, looser restrictions. Even for the upcoming election, good politics is the same old song and dance: low taxes, less bureaucracy, less threats to civil liberties and more free trade. As these things continue to stress us, we are ignoring the problems that we try to sugarcoat with optimism as our own desires continue to impede our interests abroad.
Perhaps instead of thinking this, it behooves us to take the upcoming holiday season and reconsider these nation-defining values not as a matter of the ballot box but as a matter of the heart and soul. The late Dwight Eisenhower left us a reminder: “A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both.”
Jeff Genota is a junior political science major.
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