America in a Mirror

[Star Man]

America before a Mirror
by John Omaha

America stands before a mirror. Images register on America's retinas, but the meaning of the images has not yet emerged in America's consciousness. Currently, America registers images of inadequacy, of failure, of doubt. However, the human mind is so complex that the images can register, the images can provoke strong emotion, but the American mind has not raised the meaning of the images to awareness.

America can see the pictures of flooding in Houston, but America does not recognize its inadequacy, its inability to comprehend global warming and climate change. America can see news reports of fighting in Afghanistan but it has not yet realized the inadequacy of its vast military apparatus. America can register the images of white supremacist Nazis marching in Charlottesville, but America has not yet understood its failure to resolve its self-absorption, violent social disconnection, and its habit of externalizing its psychological dysfunction through blaming and attacking others.

America defends itself from awareness of the meaning of the images of flooding, of the economic discrepancy between the few and the great mass of the many, of the lack of universal health care, of its treatment of women. The nation has armored itself, quite literally, against awareness of its inadequacy as if spending $600 million on defense would protect it from knowing its core of inadequacy. Yet feelings of inadequacy, of doubt, of failure are crushing the nation, breaking the nation. America defends itself with an illusion of greatness, of exceptionalism, yet even that illusion is under unconscious attack and must be defended against with hats reading “Make America Great Again.” America's demons of inadequacy, failure, and doubt are boiling up, rattling the nation's core like the supervolcano beneath Yellowstone.

Copyright 2017 by John Omaha. All Rights Reserved.

[american dream]

America before a Mirror
by John Omaha ...

This inferno - hopefully like other recent disasters, is leading again to the truth that the power of love must, and can, overtake the love of power. I have seen this occurring all week.

[Star Man]

This inferno - hopefully like other recent disasters, is leading again to the truth that the power of love must, and can, overtake the love of power. I have seen this occurring all week.

I agree that the power of love could ( not "can") overtake the love of power. However, I do not feel sanguine that this will happen. The psychologist Murray Bowen proposed a concept of the momentum of the intergenerational transmission of psychopathology. Today there is such a great mass of people who have been so greatly damaged by their parents' projections and socialization that the probability of altering the trajectory towards catastrophe is extremely low.

Star Man