Hmmph.

Another paper, this time for American Civilization. Topic is 'How would you fix America?'

I believe one of the biggest issues facing us today in America is what we are taught both inside and outside of the classroom. My problem isn’t necessarily with the organization of the public school system, although I do know that there is room for improvement there. I worry more about the content of the lessons that we are taught as children, the lessons that we then take and pass on to our own children.  The overarching problem that I see when I witness our society’s failings, the common theme, is our interpretation of power.

            This message that pervades every facet of our lives is the reason behind a few of the most unsavory elements of our American culture. Racism, sexism and any other ‘ism’ you can think of all stem from it. Human beings as a whole are incredibly insecure creatures. The majority of our lives are spent attempting to carve out our little piece of the world, trying to find and flaunt our own power. The problem with Americans specifically is what our idea of power is. From the moment we are capable of understanding words, we are drilled with the idea that power is something that is taken from others, and it is shown by exerting it over others.

The sociological definition of power is literally that. “Power is the ability one has to make others do what they want.”  If your business makes more money, or you have the right skin color and genitalia, then you are a step higher on the social ladder and you have the right to use that leverage over others. The KKK member doesn’t believe that the color of his skin makes him superior based on any kind of evidence. He believes it because he feels powerless, and denouncing a large percent of the population based upon physical attributes gives him a sense of superiority that he doesn’t know how to gain elsewhere.

Cutthroat capitalism is centered around this ideology. The definition of a successful business in the good old US of A is different than in other places. Breaking even or meting out a meager profit margin isn’t success. Multimillion dollar CEO bonuses and stocks topping out the DOW define success here. Unfortunately for the majority of the population, the best way to reach the end of that rainbow is to marginalize hourly employees, and to cut corners with safety and product.

 Ensuring a hostile work environment for all but the highest ranking employees means high turnover and a low rate of raises, a system that has served giants like McDonalds and Walmart incredibly well. Since corporate entities operate in this manner, American society is filled with people who feel the machinations of power being exerted over us, and also feel stripped of all ability to fight against it. Join a union and get yourself fired. Fight for better pay and benefits, become so stigmatized that no company will hire you. 

The natural reaction to a feeling of powerlessness in a society that teaches us to relish it above all other things is, of course, crime. The crime rate in America is one of the highest in the world. Whether it is vehicular theft or assault and battery, a criminal act is used to assert agency and claim power, even if that power is as small a thing as not starving to death this week.

 Men especially are susceptible to deviation because of this lesson. The idea of machismo, its effect on crime rates and the effect it has on society as a whole is astonishing. It’s no coincidence that the more rigid the idea of gender roles are in a given area, the higher the violent crime rates are. In this country, 86% of violent crimes are committed by men, and 53% of those men are between the ages of 15 and 29, an age range when they are under the most societal pressure.

Once a young boy hits the age of sexual virility, overbearing masculinity stops being something they are being taught how to achieve and turns into something that he should have and display at every opportunity. Pattern predators are even categorized based upon whether they are seeking or exerting this elusive thing. A perpetrator of violent crime is either Power Reassurant/Anger Retaliatory or Power Assertive/Anger Excitatatory.  The media does no one any favors by spreading the message that such acts will gain you notoriety and attention. Every time a news anchor gives the name of a killer and not their victims, they put them above the victims, and they teach anyone watching who is seeking their own slice of power that there is a quick and easy way to attain it. This glorification of offenders, descriptions of intelligent snake charmers who masterfully evade police, of alpha wolves hunting sheep, assures the continuation of such instances. It is also not a coincidence that one mass shooting hitting the media assures more shortly after. 

In order to fix this, we have to burn it down and start from scratch, figuratively speaking. There’s nothing inherently wrong with teaching people to be powerful. We will, after all, seek out such a feeling ourselves without any sort of guidance. What we need to do is change the perception of what power means, and how one attains it. Schools, parents, magazines and news outlets need to stop perpetuating a bad message. 

A CEO using money denied to his underlings to buy a yacht isn’t powerful, he is an asshole. The union representative fighting for a living wage and the ability to stay home from work when you have a broken leg is the one with power. Serial killers and spree killers aren’t powerful. Someone who has those same impulses and seeks out help is.  Power isn’t something that you gain, or even that you can take. It is something that you build up inside of you, and you do that by resisting selfish impulses, controlling yourself and trying to make the world better for having you in it. A country of people who are the captains of their own souls is a country that has no limits.