Living In USA

World Leadership
The end of the cold war has brought more violence to the world than when there were two large, stabilizing forces looming at one another in the form of the Warsaw Pact and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Most Americans are uncomfortable with playing the role of the world's policeman, but threats to our own interests as well as a fear of a world without military leadership allow many of us to be persuaded to commit military forces to places like Bosnia and Iraq. Many Americans either distrust the United Nations outright, or else they generally support the UN, but fear that it is ineffective in a crisis. We are, at best, ambivalent about the role of the United States in relation to the rest of the world.

Energy, Water, and the Environment
The American appetite for energy, primarily in the form of oil, promises to pose serious political and economic stress for many years to come. The United States does not produce enough petroleum to satisfy our appetite, making us dependent on foreign sources. We have low gasoline prices and a love affair with large vehicles. Proponents of energy independence are sharply divided on how to proceed. One faction wishes to exploit more oil reserves in the U.S., primarily in Alaska, while others are unwilling to sacrifice national wildlife preserves for what is at best a temporary solution. Unwilling to seriously subsidize mass transit and pedestrian paths and bikeways, the United States spends some 200 million dollars per day on road construction.

The United States has about 4 percent of the world's population, and consumes a quarter of the world's energy. Of course, other highly industrial countries also disproportionately consume energy. For each dollar of gross domestic product, however, the U.S. consumes about 40 percent more energy than Japan or the European Union.

Global climate change has directed our attention to the coming crisis in water allocation. The Southwestern desert has virtually bloomed with agricultural expansion as a result of the dam projects of the last century. But while agricultural use is expected to be reduced, the municipal demand in places like Nevada and Arizona is expected to continue to increase. These hot, dry areas are the fast-growing population centers in the U.S.

Health-care costs have spiraled out of control. Millions of Americans do not have any health insurance, and those who do are largely not willing to give up what they have in exchange for a more equitable system. For the most part, we believe that we have the best health care in the world, and we want to hang onto it at any cost.

Furthermore, the U.S. population is aging. Our medical care system will be crushed along with the national pension system, called Social Security, unless significant structural reform is achieved. By most estimates, the Social Security system will stop generating a surplus around 2020 and will exhaust its trust fund by the year 2034. Many Americans do not rely on Social Security, depending instead on privately funded pension plans. This means that the poor will by far bear the biggest share of this hardship.

Americans, like many people around the world, have a "love-hate" relationship with globalization. Of course we, like many people, enjoy buying high-quality goods at lower prices. Of course we also object when employers close up manufacturing or, increasingly, high-tech facilities and then move those jobs to countries that hire workers at lower wages. We also do not like to see companies fatten their profits by avoiding environmental or safety regulations when they move to other countries. We like to talk about free trade but overlook our own protections on agricultural and other goods. We have faith in the free market but tend to forget that historically, all major economies, including our own, advanced as a result of stiff tariffs and other means of protecting domestic industries.

The power that corporations are able to exert over the political process is staggering. While some hail the collapse of Enron and the financial scandals of other corporations as evidence that the bad guys do get caught, it is more likely that they represent the tip of the iceberg. Corporate influence on the electoral process, and the resulting access to politicians (of both parties), threatens to undermine our treasured democratic ideals.

Americans are more segregated than ever. We are segregated by race and ethnicity, by class, and increasingly, by politics. We are diverse as a country, but we live in neighborhoods with people who are more and more like us. As journalist David Brooks observed, "Block by block, and institution by institution, we are remarkably homogenous."

Because we are such a geographically mobile country, we have frequent opportunities to make choices about where we will live. Progressives and liberals are drawn to Boston and San Francisco, while conservatives might be more likely to choose Texas. The realignments seem to be moving us into more and more politically homogeneous states as well.

Dualism is the idea that there are only two ways to look at any problem, situation, or the world. American culture is, by its very nature, rather dualistic. We tend to see things as either black or white. Either we are friends or we are not. Either something is right or it is wrong. A person is either good or evil. This position does not allow us to accept shades of gray or a middle ground when approaching complex situations.

Pernicious dualism, a term often used by Columbia University Teachers' College professor L. Lee Knefelkamp, refers to the tendency of some people to exploit dualism to their advantage (the word pernicious means "done with evil intent."). [2] Either you support the war or you are unpatriotic. You are either with us, or you are "with the terrorists." Those who oppose the U.S. occupation of Iraq "hate freedom." And pernicious dualists are not always political conservatives; liberals can be just as limiting in their framing of problems. Either you support Affirmative Action or you are a racist. Either you support abortion rights or you are a woman hater. The list on both sides goes on.

However, as linguist George Lakoff has observed, the political right is far more effective in naming issues and programs in order to force a dualistic response. [3] Who could be against a "healthy forest initiative" or against laws with names like the "patriot" act or the "defense of marriage" act? Obviously, only a person who is an anti-marriage, tree-hating traitor could oppose these, never mind that these issues were, respectively, about increasing logging on public land, curbing civil liberties, and denying millions of committed same-sex couples the right to marry. Again, the point here is not that these programs were themselves without any merits, only that in naming them the way they did, their proponents were able to cut short vital debate about their strengths and weaknesses.

If Americans cannot become more comfortable with nuance, complexity, and relativism, we become more likely to fall into the pernicious dualist's trap. We lose the ability to think clearly and creatively about complex problems and will tend to increasingly rely on those with the most extreme positions to define our issues and limit our solutions. This polarization in our thinking, further promoted by our two-party monopoly on national politics, is making us as a country more divided.

United States is a land of religious pluralism. Protestants, Catholic, and other Christian groups have by and large laid the foundation for a society that includes Mormons, Muslims, Buddhists, Jains, Sikhs, Hindus, Wiccans, and countless other faiths.

Religious fundamentalists (those who believe that their version of their faith has a monopoly on virtue) are increasing both in their numbers and in their influence. Just as Islamic fundamentalists, a tiny fringe of the world's billion-plus Muslims, are increasing in their numbers and influence around the world, Christian fundamentalists are threatening to end the equality of faiths in this country. People of faith, quite understandably, view their religion as the best possible path. But when they begin to view it as the only possible path, taking it to the extreme of using their political, military, or physical power to punish those who believe differently, it threatens everyone.