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A Sub-Culture of Hate
Commentary by
Eileen Workman
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THE REST OF THE WORLD no longer looks to the “United” States as a trusted global leader, a support system for the suffering, a savior of the brutalized, or a hero for the cause of genuine democratic and humanitarian ideals worldwide. They no longer look to our culture as a promise of what could also be possible for themselves, but as a cautionary tale for what can go wrong once we sacrifice our willingness to work together. American egos are running amok collectively now, and are trampling the beautiful spirit of who we once strove to be into the mud of greed, selfishness, entitlement, bitterness, rage, and fear.
Many around the world view us today as a declining global power in collapse. They do feel compassion for us as human beings, because they realize many of us are now caught inside this mess of a once-robust nation against our will. But they aren’t riding in to our rescue, since as a nation we remain in active resistance to taking accountability for our harmful past behaviors. They watch us doubling down instead, and can only shake their heads and marvel, because they’re older and wiser, and they have all been here before.
Many also naturally feel fear to be witnessing the collapse of a once-great empire; it’s not easy to surrender respect for a childhood superhero, or to relinquish hope for a savior to come riding in to the rescue. Although they certainly feel no shame for having allied with us in the past. They trusted us then, based on the honor of our word—but we have broken it enough times now that they realize their trust was misplaced, so it’s not coming back.
We have behaved dishonorably for too long as a nation and as a people. The most serious consequences for that have not yet begun to fully manifest, but they’re coming.
Europe and Australia now choose to go their own way by deciding how they want to be in the future as a Euro/Australian Community without our undue influence, or even our inputs anymore. Our betrayal by electing Trump for a second time was a bridge too far. Once, they could overlook and forgive as a systemic aberration and an irrational cultural blunder. Twice?
They aren’t allowing themselves to be fooled again.
They now seek to render us virtually irrelevant to their continued wellbeing, because we have left them no choice.
Central/South American and African nations have been expanding their financial and trading ties with the Chinese for a couple of decades, and have established new Asian trade agreements and humanitarian relationships for future development. Those seeking to immigrate from those countries now realize they’re no longer welcome here, so their labor capacities, hopeful can-do attitudes, and entrepreneurial drives will no longer be flowing our way to inject our nation with fresh bursts of enthusiasm, or the natural generosity that flows from gratitude when we help others self-actualize, rather than punish them for not having done so sooner.
Asia, Canada, and Mexico also realize they cannot count on us anymore for friendly trade, or for other forms of fair and mutually beneficial exchange. So they too now realize they’ll be best served to look to other parts of the world for fresh opportunities, and to look to themselves to determine how to be healthier and stronger without us than they ever were while with us.
We actually do sound right now like a narcissistic spouse, screaming, “You’ll be sorry when I’m gone!” at their silently relieved partner, who is counting the days until the divorce is final and the assets are safely split so that the narcissist can longer control their wellbeing, or threaten their safety whenever they don’t get their way. We are presently being Gray Rocked by the rest of the world; only we confuse their determined refusal to engage with us (because it’s a bloody waste of time) with submissive compliance and with silent respect.
Gulf of America, indeed. A foolish move for a tarnished brand. But then, when has the tarnishing of the brand—rather than demanding that the shiny spotlight of attention be cast upon it, for good or ill—ever mattered to Donald Trump, or Elon Musk? Does it even matter to those of us cheering them on, or just silently assenting to, their ego-driven antics and casually destructive behaviors?
Where global trade is concerned, has it even occurred to most Americans that we have been global net importers and consumers, rather than global producers and net contributors, for many decades? And that we feel wealthy not because we are better then all those others, but because we have exploited those others in their distress so that we don’t have to work nearly as hard to acquire and enjoy all the stuff that we now take for granted, as “rightfully ours.”
Only the rest of the world’s longstanding willingness to embrace the US dollar as its global currency standard still preserves our collective buying power today. So if our brutishness and rudeness, our entitlement and our contemptuousness finally offend our global trading partners deeply enough, we’d best be prepared for mass shortages, along with a sharp decline in the perceived value of the dollar—as well as in all things American. And all right about the same time that the social safety net we have spent nearly a century weaving, after our first Great Depression caused so much damage, suffering, and death, is being actively and hastily dismantled.
Hooray!
And if you think we can just start manufacturing all sorts of goods here at home, and right away, and then all will be well—I have some more news for you. The only way to do that is to remove many regulations we put in place to protect the quality of our local environments. It will also require the American people to toil in those factories ourselves, out of desperation and a lack of alternatives. And even then, we still don’t have nearly enough natural resources to feed the capitalistic, consumptive, corporate beast that craves endless profits at the expense of nature and humanity both; which might be why this administration now seeks to extort or pillage still more resources from others.
Still, it does seem that building many new manufacturing plants so we can produce the crappy, unnecessary goods that we buy to assuage our own existential emptiness will soon be affecting a neighborhood near you. Expect more belching factories, more polluted waters, more industrial accidents, and more financially motivated systemic failures to cause greater death and environmental destruction. Expect increasingly barren soil—not to mention more plant and animal extinctions and intensifying natural disasters—as our continued violent rape of the splendor of Mother Nature can now expand, unimpeded by life itself, within our own borders.
I suspect this to be an ultimately healthy development in the process of bringing the Age of Political, National Empires to an end, assuming we don’t destroy ourselves in the process. I also sense many Americans still have no idea what others around the world are actually feeling, or how they perceive us. We have taken our “special” status for granted for far too long, because we started believing we were some sort of uniquely positioned, forever beacon of liberty and communal creativity. A shining city on the hill, we told ourselves, rather smugly, filled with truly exceptional people. Those unexceptional “others” were clearly causing all of the problems we now face; so once we have eliminated or criminalized all of them, we’ll all be just fine.
We have wrongly attached the label of “meritorious” and good to ourselves, while assigning an “undeserving, unworthy” evil label to almost all others. In that, we are sacrificing our humaneness on the altar of our own judgmentalism.
We actually did this to ourselves—that’s the crazy part. We started to take our role as the sole leading nation for humanity’s future way too seriously, and we allowed it to hyper-inflate our communal ego, even as our attention turned toward the darker side of power/dominator, animalistic brutality. We conflated power with force; we’ve lost sight of the innateness of human dignity because we commoditized the worth of “others” and then treated them as undeserving based on our collective judgments.
We reached for tools of coercion and vengeance and violence as useful shortcuts to the harder, though ultimately more sustainable practice of trusting grace, and compassion, and wisdom, and genuinely peaceful goodwill to bring others along with care, and kindness, and patience—and with respect for our interdependence, rather than out of disgust or anger at having to expend the heartfelt effort it actually takes to foster love and more harmonious co-creation.
What hubris!
What absolute, utter folly.
What happens now? We will need to await the fallout from our ongoing, stubborn refusal to learn from either our own mistakes, or from the successes or failures of others. I certainly don’t know where these uncharted waters are carrying us, but if it results in a humbler, more gracious, wisely restrained way of relating more respectfully with others, then I will welcome those changes—even though I find the means we are using to achieve that unintended result to be painful, destructive on many levels, and harmful to countless people and to our own planet.
As Confucius once said, “By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest.”
Maybe capitalism needs to bitterly self-destruct, and right here at home, for the fever dream of it all to finally die around the world. Maybe we do need to reap the direct consequences of our exploitation, colonialism, and reliance on brute force to extract whatever we want. Maybe we need to be taught, in an undeniable way, that we cannot enslave reality in service to only ourselves, and still live in a reality that we will ultimately find worth enjoying. Maybe we still need to learn why purely transactional relationships cannot and do not thrive over the long haul in an increasingly conscious and fully interdependent world, and why love is truly the only binding agent powerful enough to sustain us whenever rapid changes introduce stress.
Maybe.
Is this an apocalyptic end of our species we are fast approaching, or just the ending of a painful old era as we discover why it makes sense for us all to become ever more humane?
Nobody knows. But the relentless winds of change will blow either way—which is as it ever was, and ever will be. So I do suggest we try loving one another for a little while, and while we still can. Let’s wonder together where love can lead us; because judging and condemning each other, while doing battle against our own imagined fears and projected assumptions has not proved itself a particularly lucrative or sustainable practice.
— Eileen Workman
Author of Raindrops of Love For a Thirsty World
and Sacred Economics (The Currency of Life)
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