The Curse of Potential

Remember that person you fell in love with back when you were young, the one who was so exciting, the one who had potential.

I mean, that’s who you fall in love with when you’re 19 or so, the person you think they might become when they reach the point where they can do something with all those ideas they have.

For me it was the guy I met when I was dating his roommate. He was sexy, he had deep thoughts, he was an artist. The roommate seemed stodgy by comparison.

So I dumped the roommate. I went for exciting potential.

My judgment was pretty lousy when I was 19. Fast forward twenty years or so and it was very obvious which one of these two men had become someone you’d want to know and which one was still stuck in potential.

I mention this not as a cautionary tale on youthful romance (though it certainly is that), but as a metaphor for my relationship with my country. We have just passed the 4th of July, following sharply on several Supreme Court opinions shredding even more of the rights people of my generation fought for. Where the United States is headed is on my mind.

I came of age in the late 60s and early 70s, and while that was a time of turmoil in this country (and in others), it was also a time when the United States was more than a little exciting. And it had potential. Oh, god, did it have potential.

There was the Civil Rights Movement, followed by the Black Panthers. Second Wave feminism. An anti-war movement that questioned the imperialism our country pretended not to have. Gay rights. Farmworkers organizing.

And hippies. We were all about sex and drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, but also communes, and, a little more practically, co-ops. We questioned authority, didn’t trust anyone over 30, and shook things up. A lot.

Things were changing everywhere. We got civil rights laws with teeth in them — voting rights, affirmative action, equal opportunity in jobs and housing — and we had a Supreme Court that understood what the 14th Amendment was all about.

Go back to the Declaration of Independence, pretending for a moment that it wasn’t written by enslavers and that the word “men” was meant to include women, and you could see, for a few years anyway, that we could have a country built on equality allowing us all life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

The United States always had potential, and for a brief time back then it looked as if it might live up to it.

I believed in that potential for far too many years, but the last seven have brought me down to earth. I’ve been angry about many political things in my country for the last forty-something years — since Reagan, because I thought we’d driven those people out after the end of Nixon — but up until the last few years I was still holding out hope for that potential.

Especially if you are white, it is almost impossible to grow up in the United States without believing in American Exceptionalism. It might as well be in the water and it’s certainly embedded in the educational system.

Even if you can, as I can and do, enumerate the many faults of this place, it is hard to give up that underlying belief that this is the best of all possible countries.

It’s not just our wealth, though that certainly helps. It’s also that revolutionary rhetoric and the fact that the ugly truths of our history have been papered over. Or forgotten — maybe that’s the most accurate word in a country that is built on the assumption that once we pass a couple of laws outlawing discrimination we’ve fixed everything and don’t have to think about racism anymore and can even declare the laws unnecessary after a few years of half-hearted compliance.

Which is why we don’t ever completely get rid of the abusive laws. The Comstack Act is still on the books and might be enough to outlaw mailing of medication abortion pills. The court decisions that made that law an unenforceable laughingstock are being overturned.

And we never got the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution to guarantee women would have rights, leaving the door open to forced birth laws.

We should have amended many other parts of the Constitution, especially the set up of the Senate where California’s 40 million people and Wyoming’s under 600,000 each have two senators. Not to mention the electoral college that has given us two recent right wing presidents who lost the popular vote by large margins.

We’re bad at fixing things because we shove them under a rug. The country let the same white people who dragged this country into a Civil War continue to control a large section of it afterwards and in fact adopted racist policies to appease those people and their significant political power.

The United States had potential and it squandered it. Right now we’re trying to salvage some basic elements of democracy — the rule of law and the right to vote.

I’ll keep doing my part in that, because the fascist authoritarianism that is openly admitting it doesn’t think everyone should vote and that some people should be above the law is too horrific to contemplate, much less allow to come to power.

But I’m not 19 anymore and I don’t have time to wait for this country to reach its potential.

It kind of breaks my heart.