In this season of Thanksgiving, it’s important to remember all that we have to be thankful for in our nation, writes Business Report Editor Stephanie Riegel in her latest column.
“But I don’t think most of us really have a clue how good we’ve got it; or, at least, have had it up until now. We’re a narcissistic, materialistic culture that has become accustomed to a level of comfort and prosperity that is unparalleled in human history,” Riegel writes. “Even those in our impoverished neighborhoods—where there is debilitating poverty and need—live better than billions of destitute people in the world’s developing nations. Yet we feel as though we deserve better and are entitled to more.”
This attitude, Riegel notes, was strikingly apparent during the recent election season, particularly—though not exclusively—among the Donald Trump supporters she knows.
“What particularly baffled me was the raw, visceral anger I heard so often over the past few months—not from the rural, working class voters credited with sending Trump to the White House, but from the professional, middle and upper-middle class people I know in Baton Rouge and New Orleans,” she says. “…What do they have to be so angry about? How has this country done them so wrong?”
Riegel can understand the frustration of the disenfranchised, blue-collar workers who lack a college degree and, increasingly, a place in today’s post-industrial economy. But she can’t understand where so many of the relatively affluent people she knows are coming from.
“They have it better than any people in any time in history,” she says, still conceding that there’s too much government regulation and anti-competitive tax policies and acknowledging that it’s difficult to do business.
Still, Riegel wonders if things really are as bad as some say.
“Have things gotten so bad that we had to elect to the highest office in the land an unqualified megalomaniac who flaunted his disregard for constitutional democracy during the campaign and has already named an anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist to be his top adviser?” she asks. “We’re playing with fire here, and don’t seem to realize what’s at stake. Talk about a thankless nation.”
But then, she says, we are living in what is now being called a “post-truth era,” where objective reality no longer frames our understanding of the world. Only how we feel about things matters, she says.
“I’m not making this up. The term has become so ubiquitous that The Oxford Dictionaries declared “post-truth” to be its international word of the year,” Riegel writes. “I’m not sure how democracy, which is rooted in principles of rational thought, survives in a world where reason no longer matters. We’re about to find out.”
Read the full column. Send your comments to editors@businessreport.com.
