The picture here is worth more than a thousand words. It’s emblematic of sooooooo much. The national security vulnerabilities alone are spectacular.
Now today we have a list of the classified and other governments the FBI seized from Mar-A-Lago, including a list of empty classified folders with no clue as to where the original content is.
The fact that a former president straight-up stole these documents (and hundreds more) and is whipping up a firestorm of BS justifications, denials, and contradictions is breathtaking if not actually surprising. The media’s hyperfocus on Trump’s legal attempts to slow any prosecution is indicative of how we got here in the first place.
These documents were found in a fancy room in a modern-day castle owned by a rich huckster who managed to claw his way to the presidency through fame and grift, in a country of growing wealth inequality. The culture warriors he’s stirring up to defend him in yet another indefensible and illegal move are the same folks he’s stirred up for years by leveraging fear, resentment, and bigotry. They’re not just citizens, though. The people who are defending him are part of enormous institutions that hold massive power in the US - including a major political party and major media empires.
Those same institutions and the people within them have spent decades convincing us not to invest in everyday Americans - which is part of what’s led to the resentment that Donald Trump leverages so effectively.
It’s rotting the country. The refusal to invest in Americans and American communities is now championed by the culture warriors themselves; even as so many would benefit from a government that actually took care of its citizens and its communities.
They’re rotting the moral fabric. They’re rotting the social contract. They’re rotting our national security. We’re collectively paying for all of that rot, though. We’re not building strength, security, resilience, and competitiveness. We’re weakening it.
You can drive very nearly anywhere in huge swaths of the US and see the simpler signs of this in the places where we live. It looks like vine-covered houses and rotting rooves in small towns where the economic engines have long-since stopped running. It looks like faded particle board nailed to windows in downtowns from small towns to urban neighborhoods. It looks like abandoned factories and schools that we can’t or won’t support anymore.
This month’s example of that rot is in Jackson, Mississippi where the refusal to invest in infrastructure in Black communities over decades has finally led to a situation where the water system just doesn’t work anymore.
What happened to the American Rescue Plan Act funds that were specifically designed to help update water system infrastructure in communities like Jackson? “Bureaucracy” is the short and easy answer; and the fact that matching funds were required to a point and Jackson doesn’t have them partly because Jackson’s tax base has decreased as white flight has occurred. The longer and more uncomfortable answer in many places and states is that politicians have priorities communities and neighborhoods that they prefer, and they tend to be on the paler side. They don’t intend to invest in all Americans and all communities. Life stays difficult and challenging in so many places; but it doesn’t have to be that way.
All of that ties to our overall refusal to invest in US communities and in everyday US people. It’s not an accident. It’s rooted in pushback to the civil rights era, and we’ve been doing it (or rather, not doing it) for 50 years. It shows.
We’re not investing in infrastructure overall, either.
In recent years even as we’ve considered investing just a little tiny bit in infrastructure, most of the big ideas have fallen away - even with a slight Democratic party majority in Congress. After trillions in big idea and big infrastructure “Build Back Better” possibilities fell off the Congressional radar, we finally saw an infrastructure bill make it into law this year. It’s not huge. Voters won’t likely notice effects anytime soon, either, because it takes time to transform appropriated federal funds into real-world change.
It is definitely excellent that we got that Inflation Reduction Act - it will do a lot of good for Americans and for American infrastructure.
We need way bigger, though. We have big, complicated problems and we need serious, visionary, transformative ideas and legislation to realistically address those problems in effective ways.
Bassem Youssef suggests we promote our rotting infrastructure to potential migrants, though, in this punchy video below. Solve two problems at once, he says - infrastructure and immigration.
Of course, that just brings us back to resentment and bias and the culture war. And a former president leveraging his culture warriors to enable, excuse, and further his spectacular weakening of national security. The noise that fuss is creating creates further rot. Every argument Republicans make convincing Trump’s “base” of supporters that it’s a-okay for Trump to have stolen extremely sensitive and highly classified weakens our national security.
This all sucks. It’s overpowering, and overbearing. It’s honestly quite terrifying, in many ways. I get sick to my stomach seeing the photo of the highly classified documents Trump had casually in his office. It’s worse reading the list of what’s been taken.
We’re not going to fix any of this anytime soon. We can help not just by voting, but also by working to change the narrative. By championing the vision and values we actually want to see in this country. By talking about what we want for ourselves and our people and our kids and our friends’ kids and our nieces and nephews and progeny.
I’d like to see us actually decide to have a country where we choose to invest in Americans, in American communities, in American innovation, in American manufacturing, in American resilience, in more sustainable American supply chains, and on and on. We’re not doing any of that - yet. Not in big ways.
What we’re doing is we’re deadlocked. We’re atrophying. We’re in a culture war when we need to be doing big problem-solving to seriously address the very real risks in front of us. Are we going to decide to do things differently?
That’s what this shift here is about. It’s about changing the path we’re on, and choosing to go in a different direction. If you change the direction of a ship leaving Europe even half a degree, it can make the difference in which continent it reaches when it gets to the other side of the ocean.
That’s what we need to do - turn this giant ship. I think we can.
Shift the Country is working to announce webinar workshops over the next few days for how we’re going to get this shift going from our end, anyway. We’re just at the beginning.
This country can be and do so much more than what we’re doing now. I believe that. I hope you do, too.
So let’s go after it.
Pass this along if you’re on board, and support us where you can through a paid subscription or any donations.
Be well, and have a great holiday weekend -
Yes, Vanessa. We can do better. We must. I think that’s what Biden hoped to draw attention to with his speech in Philadelphia. Our task is to figure out how to connect with—and mobilize—the many people who agree. Keep spreading the word!