My Letter to America

Oh no, what’s this?
A spider web, and I’m caught in the middle.
So I turned to run.
The thought of all the stupid things I’ve done.
Trouble
 – Coldplay

Back when I was a kid, I used to listen to Casey Kasem’s American Top 40 on the radio on most Sundays. And, as I am sure you’ll recall, there was always that moment when Casey would introduce that week’s “long-distance dedication,” typically a heart-rending appeal to love lost or love unrequited or love separated by unbridgeable distances, time… or death.

So, in the spirit of American Top 40, I’d like to dedicate Coldplay’s Trouble to the American people…

Living on the other side of the pond now for more than half a decade, I watch my home country from a distance.

But from an oceanic distance away, farsightedness kicks in and you see America more clearly.

You see what too many of your countrymates and your friends refuse to see, can’t see, or that they insist is your wrong interpretation of events because how can you know what’s happening when you’re not even in America anymore?

And, yes, I hear that all the time when I try to talk to friends about what’s unfolding in the US these days.

They don’t want to believe what I see, though they have no experience on which to base their objections. Nevertheless, the truth is that you see the big picture far clearer at distance. It’s that whole “missing the forest for the tress” thing.

And “at distance” is why my long-distance dedication is necessary. So…

Dear, Casey,

I grew up in the absolute best version of America, the son of Boomers, the grandson of The Greatest Generation, in an era of expanding equality and expanding opportunity for all.

Though the grandparents who raised me were lower-middle-class, I knew I could grow up to chase whatever American Dream I could conjure, whatever career and lifestyle I wanted. The future… was bright. My America really was that shining beacon on the hill.

I never feared for my safety out in public. Never worried my country might devolve, or that politicians would ruin my country’s financial security. I was never concerned that my Constitutional rights were temporary and revokable at the whims of a minority of zealots. I knew about political parties, but never had to consider that if I didn’t believe the teachings of one side that I’d be labeled a traitor to my country or an enemy of the people.

But today, Casey, my America is a dysfunctional family in the midst of pulling itself apart permanently. Where once there was love and respect, there is now only hatred and contempt in the House that America Built.

The America I grew up in is now America Lost. A better America. A safer America. A smarter America. An America much of the world looked up to not because we demanded it or bought it, but because the premise of America and all that she stood for appealed to people everywhere.

Nowadays, the beacon is tarnished and the super-shocks that await are insurmountable.

• A supersized debt shock that even a former Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, now says is a threat to national security. Our debts will, guaranteed, bring death to the American dollar as a reserve currency and all the nastiness at home that such an event necessarily must cause.

• An oil shock wrought by aggressively wrongheaded pursuits of green energy at the expense of maintaining sufficient fossil fuel production to meet continually rising demand for energy in the non-Western world.

• The political super-shock-to-come from a society now cleaving into two camps diametrically opposed to each other’s views on social-justice, religion, politics, even the basic and fundamental rights once afforded by the Constitution.

How times have changed, Casey. I simply can’t fathom that the America I grew up in during the 1970s and 1980s has fallen so far, and that we have allowed it.

So, I’d like to dedicate Coldplay’s Trouble to my country, in hopes that Americans realize the trouble they’re in. They don’t see it, because they live too close to the problems and they’re too busy just surviving day-to-day.

But from a perspective here in Europe, I see the end as clear as those fruited plains, those amber waves of grain, those purple mountains majesty. Americans are in the spider web, caught in the middle, nowhere to turn and run.

Maybe this will give them clarity.

Thanks, Casey.

A sad American in Europe…