Collective shame and guilt:

In the grip of fear that is all too grounded in real events that are happening at a rapid pace, reported by the media as generalities and corroborated by our own experiences and those of people we talk to every day.

What has happened in the last eight years has so depressed the American people because of two wars, beginning with the stealing of a presidential election (and the out-performance in the second election of the Republicans, which demonstrated their superior understanding of the electoral process) and ending with our economic decline. I am at a loss for words, but something should be said about the affect on the American collective psyche as we witness the stealing of our basic rights as citizens, including habeas corpus and the protection of our privacy and then the collective guilt that some Americans have felt upon learning that our nation was practicing torture, rendition flights and atrocities against foriegn civilians in the name of military action or maintenance of our 764 military bases that we admit to having. Our national mood has changed from one of hope, a kind of joyful sense of being the richest and most powerful nation in the history of the world, backed up by extraordinary achievements in every field of human activity including the Fine Arts which we have every right to be proud of to one of shame and fear, because everybody is either personally affected or knows somebody who is affected by the threat of the loss of their home, the loss of their job, forty-to-fifty percent drop in the value of their assets or their salaries and the possibility of even greater losses. Europeans don't seem to have taken on the full gravity of this catastrophe, at least those we have the privilege of knowing. They are lighthearted, full of whimsy and imagination, playful as ever and retain their sense of identity and uniqueness, whereas I feel Americans are being swallowed up in some group panic and with many signs of the loss of identity and their self-confidence. The collective American psyche is sick and will get sicker. It makes me think of that idea of victor's justice: No leaders of countries will ever be punished no matter what atrocities they have committed unless their countries have been defeated. Remember the hanging of German and Japanese generals after WW2. In the case of America we have not been defeated by an enemy but by ourselves. Self-incrimination and the form of self-punishment complicated by a paralyzing fear of what the future holds which creates this sick collective psyche is much harder to put behind us and find a cure for than the result of a military defeat which requires massive rebuilding of cities and a series war crimes tribunals and summary executions which mark a punctuation from which the nation can move on. In a certain sense, the election of Obama has served as a distraction from the collective guilt and perhaps can promise a new beginning, mainly because by electing an African American the American people have implicitly acknowledged our oldest source of shame, the enslavement of our African brothers and sisters and their subjection and mistreatment which still continues today, not to mention the genocide of the indigenous population. How much or whether or not the election of an African American whose ancestors were not slaves can in any way deal with our collective guilt in a way that contributes to our healing remains to be seen. I doubt that the capacity to believe in a brighter future in short, to be hopeful, is something a nation as sick as ours can muster, given the fact that we have not even seen the full consequences of our economic decline and collective suffering. Hope just doesn't come with this kind of illness.