America’s Idea

To the Editor:

Whenever this country has a problem, you can be certain that Hollywood will soon have a movie about it. No doubt the country has had a lot of problems and a baker’s century of movies to help air them out. During the darker days of war with Germany and Japan, movies served to rally spirits as well as provide an entertaining distraction from war’s increasingly gruesome stamp on the American psyche. Movies became the mirror in which Americans measured their fears, their faith and their fight. They saw themselves, and mostly what they saw was real to them. And when it wasn’t, they knew that too. They didn’t need fact checkers to enlighten them, or experts to tell them who to hate and what to believe.

Americans knew who they were, and what the country was and stood for. But what they may not have known or understood was that everything they beheld — the Capital or the White House, the Pentagon or the Supreme Court — none of it exists as advertised in our Constitutional document when a nearing majority of those living here no longer believe they, each and every one of them, bears the responsibility to love honor and protect the simple idea of personal freedom on which all it rests.

America is an idea in the age of information, where ideas are ephemeral, as transitory as a grand jury’s ham sandwich indictment or a propagandist’s mercurial manipulation of emotion. Each one of us is standing against a Cat 5 storm of social media peer posturing posing as actionable reality. And each moment you allow this torrent to preposition you with intolerance for the ideas that define who we once were, you are taking a step closer to the day the idea of America is declared certifiably dead and drained from any hope of sensate recovery. And the Academy Award goes to “Zombie America Wages War on Wisdom.”