Turning Point:
President Trump issues a travel ban that would preclude travelers from
North Korea, Syria, Iran, Chad, Libya, Somalia, Yemen and Venezuela from
entering the United States.
America has a lot going for it.
We
are in the second year of rising incomes across all income groups. Our
work force is relatively young, hardworking and productive. America’s
universities and other research institutions are strong in areas like
materials science, software development, nanotechnology, biotechnology,
genomics and many other fields that are important to our future economic
growth and employment. We continue to move toward more energy
independence and cleaner energy, with advances in battery storage for
solar and wind power and a vast untapped capacity to generate
electricity from both.
We
also face serious economic challenges: severe inequalities in income
and wealth; low work force participation by adults without college
degrees, especially white men; dramatic differences in growth between
prosperous urban and suburban regions and counties full of small towns
and rural areas; gaping shortfalls in our national infrastructure, from
inadequate roads and bridges, to rusty, dangerous water pipes, to an
electrical grid incapable of moving the cleanest, cheapest energy from
where it can be produced most efficiently to where it is most needed, to
the absence of affordable, rapid broadband internet in areas that desperately need to be included in the national economy.
There
are human resource challenges, too. Our K-12 education system includes
some of the world’s best schools, but that excellence has been hard to
replicate across districts and states with widely varying conditions.
Our higher education system remains the world’s best, but costs and
student debt are big problems. Health care reform has brought millions
of people affordable, quality medical insurance for the first time, but
we have wasted too much time fighting over efforts to repeal that
progress when we should be fixing the problems that remain and preparing
for the aging of our population. The future of undocumented immigrants —
including the “Dreamers” and millions of people who are working hard
and paying taxes — is uncertain at a time when our work force cannot
grow without them; the birthrate among native-born Americans is barely
at replacement levels. From Charleston to Charlottesville, we are reminded that the racial divide remains a curse that can be revived with devastating consequences. And the opioid crisis
and its progeny, heroin and fentanyl, are killing and disabling
Americans at a staggering rate. For several years we’ve known it’s a
huge public health challenge, yet almost nowhere do we have the
resources and organization necessary to turn the tide.
Finally,
we have a serious set of security challenges, from nuclear
proliferation, to terrorism, to climate change, to cybersecurity, the
last of which may prove the most daunting because it puts all the
systems we need to deal with the other problems, and our very democracy,
at risk.
Continue reading the main story
In
spite of our overall economic progress since the 2008 crash, all these
challenges have contributed to declining economic mobility, increasing
political and social alienation and more personal insecurity for
millions of our fellow citizens. These forces have increased our
divisions, and make it even harder to recover our sense of common
purpose.
The
good news is that an aggressive effort to address our problems with
known and affordable responses would bolster the strength of our economy
and our communities through higher incomes, more upward mobility and
greater security. Many cities and several states are proving it every
day.
But
as a nation, we’re on a very different path. All too often, tribalism
based on race, religion, sexual identity and place of birth has replaced
inclusive nationalism, in which you can be proud of your tribe and
still embrace the larger American community. And too often resentment
conquers reason, anger blinds us to answers and sanctimony passes for
authenticity. These trends are fueled by our Snapchat, Twitter and
Facebook worlds, in which the attention span for issues on television
news is only a few seconds, and the very survival of newspapers depends
upon retweets of headlines from their online editions. Too many social
media sites are fever swamps of extremist foreign and domestic invaders.
Such resolute efforts to abolish the line between fact and fiction,
truth and lies, can offset all the benefits of our interconnectedness.
When trust vanishes and knowledge is devalued as an establishment
defense of the status quo, anything can happen. We already see citizens
being disenfranchised by the millions, targeted by race, ethnicity and
age not because they are ineligible to vote, but because they favor
inclusive, not tribal, nationalism.
Who
wins in this kind of environment? Those who already have it made;
they’ll make more. The least responsible members of the political media,
who will prosper covering each new controversy and outrage. And the
enemies of democracy, who feed the discord and hope that Americans will
finally concede that informed self-government no longer works — and
perhaps is no longer even possible — in the modern world.
Twenty-five
years ago, when I was elected president, I said that every American
should follow our Constitutional framers’ command to form a more perfect
union, to constantly expand the definition of “us” and shrink the
definition of “them.” I still believe that. Because I do, I favor
policies that promote cooperation over conflict and build an economy, a
society and a politics of addition not subtraction, multiplication not
division. Unfortunately, too many people in power across the world seem
determined to do the reverse. If we do that here, we will miss this
moment to build our brightest days. Therefore our most important
challenge is deciding who we Americans really are — as citizens,
communities and a nation. On that, all else depends.
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