We Have Taken Our Eyes Off What Is Important

Friends, if you want freedom, you must be willing to stand up for what is right and fight for it. That fight happens every day all around the world. When human rights abuses happen right before our eyes, we have a choice. We can sit idly by or we can jump in, roll up our sleeves, use our intellect and our voices, and stand for what is just and right. Make no mistake, when the rights of other humans are abused, your rights are also abused. If we do not come together to fight for others rights when they are in need, we might just find that in the not so distant future we are the subject of the late Breaking News story. We have a serious problem with our branding image and reputation in America. Roosevelt declared that people seek to find, protect, and serve small places, close to home, where every man, woman, and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. To this point, our history and rich heritage as a nation speaks of a promised land where personal freedom continues to be fought for, where if you work hard you can achieve great things. However, the brand of freedom many people thirst for, and are willing to put themselves in harm’s way to access, is not the same brand that many American’s wear on their sleeve. It seems many of the lucky few hundred million American citizens that call the United States home from the circumstance of their birth need to be reminded just how hard fought the winning our collective freedoms have been. America is a multifaceted nation, a diverse and vast country of enormous irony and dichotomy.

Living Proof

Extreme wealth coexists with extreme poverty. A range of social issues continues to persist within American society, draining our emotional and economic resources. Dignity is essential to helping address and solve every single one of these unrelenting social problems. America is also a technology unicorn, akin to startup stars out of Silicon Valley. The country grew up very fast and within a few hundred years came to be a world phenomenon of a military, economic, political, and cultural powerhouse. Much of this was accomplished on the backs of what were human rights abuses, taking advantage of immigrants, enslaving people, and stealing the land out from beneath the feet of Indigenous peoples. Along the way, the United States developed a cultural consciousness and became the world’s protector of democracy and freedom. Then the events of September 11, 2001, shook Americans to their core. Since then, more cynicism, hatred, insular thinking, and protectionism has seemed to manifest itself within the country, perpetuating many social needs and problems. Directly following the attacks on September 11th, 2001, the United States government, military, and intelligence communities took swift action. Taking action is what we know how to do very well. When American freedom and democracy are threatened, we rise up to the challenge and take immediate action.

Bad Company

Our psyche is such that we cannot ever let our guard down. While most citizens of the United States rally and rise against atrocities and serve in times of significant need, we often do not internalize the plight of freedoms that may be slowly slipping from our grasp. If an event, issue, or concern does not have an immediate infringement on our personal freedom, we tend to be passive, over analytical, and ambivalent. When we are touched personally, however, watch the hell out. This draws the question, when it comes down to living up to our brand promise and purpose, that is, what it means to be a citizen of our country. I believe there is plenty of proof that we have. Trump happens to have a gift, possibly better than his predecessors did, for creating a constant noise machine of illusion, distraction, and perception, with all of the attention focused on himself. I have found that many Americans, for a period, were simply awestruck by what would come out of the president’s mouth or what would be tweeted next. For someone who despises the media, Trump certainly wants the news story to be always about him. Unfortunately, the media and public have their reasons for complying with this. Most Americans are innocent bystanders watching current events play out. These days Trump is usually the main character and serves the roles of production hands, writers, musicians, and other actors.

Always In My Head

Some have paid to watch this production, and he wants all of us sitting eagerly in our chairs with our snacks, utterly captivated. Instead of feeding the beast, it would be best if we all silenced our phones and streaming media for some moments of silence. What we might find is that we are a whole lot happier and less frustrated. Further, we might discover that through all of the noise and chatter of the Trump production, we have allowed ourselves to be too distracted. We have taken our eyes off what is important and spent too many hours waiting for what could possibly happen next. Well, enough wasted time already. It is time to move beyond the hype, glitz, dysfunction, and noise and take action to create a better world for ourselves and our family. The time is now to shake ourselves free from the shackles of shock and daily desensitization that we call the media. The United States is beautiful and is a great place here and now. You, me, and we make it so. The way we have personalized consumer products is fascinating and alarming. Many people put a great deal of credence into the relationship they have with their cars, phones, and houses, valuing them as an extension of their identity. In the case of transportation, ultimately what we need is mobility, the ability to physically get ourselves from point A to point B and back to point A efficiently and safely as quickly as possible. The solution for achieving that can be as rugged as gargantuan as a Hummer or as frugal as a Fiat.