What does United States of America stand for nowadays if political division is at an all time high?
Is it still the land of the free if America has the highest rate of incarceration in the world?
Are we still the home of the brave if we refuse to stand up to injustice, because it would compromise our pocketbook?
This disconnection from reality is the definition of psychosis. Pulitzer-prize winning journalist, best-selling author, and activist Chris Hedges, has made it his life’s work to highlight this inequity and combat the complacency of the consumerist culture.
In a 2010 essay published on Adbusters, Hedges caught the eye of filmmaker Amanda Zackem, when he succinctly spelled out the problems with totalitarian capitalism and corporate power.
Those ideas deeply resonated with Zackem and caused her to reach out to Hedges about bringing his essay into the cinematic realm in order to expose them to a larger audience.
This week’s Staff Pick Premiere, “American Psychosis,” is the result of that process and their attempt to make people think more deeply about the world we’re living in.
On Monday, former president Barack Obama tweeted: “Tomorrow’s elections might be the most important in our lifetimes…The character of the country is on the ballot.”
Mr. Obama was responding not only to the rapidly consolidating autocratic nature of the Trump administration, which has eaten away at checks and balances since his inauguration, but also to the surge in hate crimes and violence over the past two years.
Conspiracy or clarity, corruption or compassion, integrity or impunity – these were the choices voters were asked to make in Tuesday’s 2018 midterm elections. The character of the country was on the ballot, and we emerged a Cubist portrait of contradictions and embarrassments.
We did not repudiate racism and hate en masse. We did not restore dignity and decency to the electoral process by ensuring the integrity of the vote. These should be non-partisan objectives, and Democrats attempted to make them non-partisan objectives by fortifying voter rights, negating the corrosive influence of dark money, and seeking to uphold American propositions so long-standing they are somewhat cliche: America as a land of immigrants, a beacon of freedom and opportunity. Some Republicans, in response, labeled basic constitutional rights and fundamental precepts of American identity as radical and dangerous, and smeared those who seek to uphold them.
The midterms had hovered over Donald Trump’s win from the moment he and the GOP claimed all branches of Congress and then slowly began eating away at the independence of the judiciary. Tuesday’s election was seen as a chance to realign the balance of power, and the Democrats succeeded in doing that, reclaiming control of the House.
This is a small but significant victory – not enough to stave off autocracy, but perhaps enough to slow it, and certainly enough to lay the groundwork for future change. Democratic control of the House allows for new bills, new orientation of the intelligence committee investigating the President, and new representatives to shape the body politic – including many historical firsts in terms of female, homosexual, Muslim and non-white candidates taking office.
It is hard, however, to rejoice at the Democrats’ gain of the House when the worst impulses of humanity are routinely stoked by the man who holds the highest power - and echoed by his GOP lackeys. Mr. Trump was already accelerating his vortex of lies and abuses – including increasingly extreme actions like trying to use the military as a prop to terrorize migrants. Law, if we are lucky, will restrain unconstitutional actions, but it cannot shape a nation’s character, our standards of what is right and fair. That burden, and that chance at redemption, is on all of us.
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