To the Editor:

About 10 years ago I said to a client of mine perhaps the most outrageous thing I’ve ever said: “The worst thing that ever happened to America was the loss of the Soviet Union.”

For a moment, my client thought that I’d lost my mind.

It was an exaggeration, yes, but then I explained that as a nation, we seemed programmed to search out an enemy, and struggle with them, for dominance, for survival. In the last century we had the Kaiser, Hitler, Tojo, Stalin, Ho Chi Minh, Manuel Noriega, Ayatollah Khomeini, Saddam Hussein, and a few that I can’t even remember. Each has come and gone: the Soviet Union was there the longest, but we spent them into bankruptcy; then they, too, disappeared. 

Without a clear cut enemy, we have turned on ourselves, and today our elected leaders have molded government into a theater of the absurd in which they create week-to-week panics, the crisis du jour … health care, immigration, or some obscure conflict halfway around the globe that in no reasonable way involves us. These are solvable problems, but too many of us fall into the emotion of these panics without questioning why.  

In advertising, sex sells; in politics, fear sells. Without the Soviet Union and the other list of enemies, we have turned on ourselves.

It’s always been tough to be an American because Thomas Jefferson and George Washington and Benjamin Franklin and John Adams and a few other smart people wrote a paper that require us to be thinking citizens, to take charge of our government by voting, and by not falling prey to the panic spread by those who feed us fear to keep themselves in the headlines. We are Americans, and we are given a special charge by the founding fathers to keep the faith in the original brilliant idea of America. But this isn’t easy. It’s easier to react to concocted crises than to find the reasonable political path that moves America forward.

America is not without its problems. Corporations bleed our industry by sending plants overseas. Jobs disappear. As a nation, we don’t invest nearly enough in our future through education, and we don’t spend nearly enough on figuring out how to employ and feed the next generation. Other nations are rising to turn the globe into their own empire, and this is the real threat. They are serious. Will we continue as America in that kind of environment?

The answer lies in our ability to measure up to the tough things, to pay attention to the global realities and not the soap opera infighting of a congress and talk show hosts who think that making noise is progress. It isn’t. If we can agree to reason together again as Americans — Republicans, Democrats, and Independents — we can make government work again, with a chance to turn over a country to our children that would draw a nod from the founding fathers.

Are you and I up to the task of believing in their vision of America? To do so, we are going to have to relearn how to talk to each other again.

Rick Bryson

Bryson City