The United States of America is not the country I would want it to be, and that’s probably a good thing.
If this were Scott’s United States, there’d be some changes. For one, we’d have at least one water slide within a 30-minute drive of every American. If that means we have to build one for a community/cult in the far-off desert, so be it.
I’d also make a rule that 25 percent of every Top 40, including country and R&B charts, must include old-fashioned rock ’n’ roll.
In addition, I’d institute the guillotine for anyone who throws trash outside their car and into my yard.
With those three examples, you can understand why a hefty sized mob of people would fear my rule. They better keep their complaints to themselves because all those criticizing my administration will be forced to wear flamboyant clown suits for the rest of their natural lives.
No doubt, I’d make a horrible king, but you probably wouldn’t do much better. As the man said, “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
We’re getting a glimpse of that from Russia, where Vladimir Putin controls the lives and deaths of his countrymen. One man has all the power, and the only way to restrain him would be to overthrow him.
Luckily for us, we don’t live that way. Our forefathers decided against the divine right of kings. They put the power into the people’s hands. That is, they put it into our hands.
But it’s not always pretty. Like I said, this nation isn’t exactly what I would want, and it’s probably not exactly what you would want. Here we are in a nation of compromise in an age when that seems like a bad word.
I’m no historian, but I know the U.S. hasn’t always lived up to its ideals. Rights have been trampled. When action was needed, it was delayed. When action wasn’t needed, it was expedited.
We live in a flawed world and a flawed country, but we’re trying.
One of Putin’s orders was to make it illegal for reporters to say Russia is at war. That’s mind boggling. His country is very much at war, but if anyone prints or broadcasts that fact, the penalty is 15 years in jail.
Compared to his restrictive regime, we’re living in the wild, wild west, where anyone attempting to muzzle the media would have better luck holding back the tides.
It’s easy to complain about our media landscape. You and I probably can agree that something’s not right even if we don’t agree on exactly what’s wrong.
The term we have these days is “silos.” I’m in my media silo and you’re in yours. (Hey, we might be in the same one. It could happen). That means we tend to get the news we want from sources we trust and reject news from sources we don’t trust.
We have a weird, polarized system that probably doesn’t serve us as well as some other method. But I doubt we could agree on what that other method should be.
With all the faults, our media is free. We can get the word out. We can call a war a war without fear of the stockade.
In a flawed world and a flawed nation, that freedom, as annoying as it can be, is something to celebrate. It’s a tie that binds us. It’s a right and a responsibility, and it’s all ours.
