The War On The American Way

From my 2015 book Turn Right At Lost: Recalculating America

At the end of the year it is traditional to look back nostalgically at events and thoughts we have experienced in our past. Here is an excerpt from my 2015 book Turn Right At Lost. It is just as important and applicable today as it was 8 years ago…

As we reflect on 2015 and some of the significant events that occurred, I think the Bruce Jenner story sticks out. I know, terrorism and mayhem have dominated the news. The Donald is a political phenomenon, and there are at least a dozen other very important and headline grabbing milestone events that happened in 2015.

I don't see the Bruce-to-Caitlyn transformation itself as the big story. I see something far more substantial, and illustrative than that. The story of a world famous, gold medal Olympic athlete, a man who dominated several sports for over a decade, and then went on to be a giant of advertising and reality TV, is not the story.

Bruce Jenner's gender transformation is just the symptom of something much bigger...

The Real Story is how his issue of gender confusion, his moral struggle with his identity, with hiding his internal war from not only his immediate family, but from an eager and intrusive media for the majority of his life, is the more important lesson. Because, like our own cultural deconstruction, our internal cultural struggle to redefine what America stands for, who we are in relation to our world community, and what we want to achieve for the next generation, Jenner's story is the story of our current cultural illness.

For lack of a better term, I will call it American Identity Dilemma Syndrome. America has AIDS.

Our beloved country is at a crossroads. We have raised a couple of generations of young leaders to believe everything my generation was taught about America is a myth. That it's history is a fraud perpetrated by selfish white, male slave owners who never gave up their privilege, and still manage to dominate the world through misrepresentation of history and international corporate control over all major assets and government.

Many believe, after years of institutional indoctrination, that it is time for America to get brought down to the most common denominator of other European and African continent countries. To give up our privilege, our implicit preference for western popular culture, for control of the earth's resources and white male oriented big businesses.

President Obama has stated similar sentiments many times. He developed his resentment towards the America I know after years of exposure to the Reverend Wright, and his political mentor, Saul Alinsky, and from earning a degree at Harvard.

As much as the War On Women, the War On Drugs, Poverty, Intolerance and Violence are indigenous to the news, our children are being conscripted, knowingly or not, into a worldwide, multi generational war of another kind.

The Bruce-to-Caitlyn Story is a caricature of a worldwide battle to redefine the nature of American power, Judeo-Christian based morality and culture. It is, as it has been for Bruce, a painful turning point in American History, and I believe is only the beginning of a lifetime long War On The American Way.