It’s ugly, but don’t give up on America now

Julio Vincent Gambuto

Jun 4·10 min read

America is not falling. Yes, it may look like that, and it may certainly feel like that. Just last week in New York City — one of capitalism’s shining capitals — stores were boarded up, windows were shattered, cop cars raced down the streets with sirens blaring as the clock struck eight on curfew hour. And that’s on the Upper East Side. These are scenes we often witness from other countries — countries in deep strife, devolved into chaos, on the precipice of revolution. Online, we are thick in the mire of disinformation, manipulation, and full-on propaganda. Yes, the gaslighting has begun. So has the gassing. And it’s hideous. But it seems that the left and right, even as they battle over the narrative, are saying the same thing: America is over.

Well, the America we knew is over, yes. But what’s coming is so much better. Our next act is unfolding, and the Black community, the very people most affected by the inequities of our society, lead it. If we can keep our eyes open and free from tears — and tear gas — and our hearts full when all we want to do is scream, what lies ahead could very well be something we have never seen or experienced before: the America we want.

I know you think I’m naive and overly hopeful amid utter pandemonium. I disagree. I am finding the larger story playing out here and asking us to get out of the mind-fuck of small-scope Facebook commentary and see this from a broader perspective. Get in the helicopter with me and look at this. Put your mask on and sit right next to me. Social unrest after social distancing is completely new territory for us. There is no precedent. We have zero ways to understand what’s next. And that is deeply unsettling. So unsettling that few of us have slept soundly in weeks. But perhaps our understanding of the future can come from an understanding of where we have been: stuck at home.

The pandemic took away the constant distraction and created the space for us to become citizens again. And it’s ugly but beautiful.

It is impossible to divorce what is happening now from the three months that preceded it. Terribly so, George Floyd was not the first Black man whose murder was recorded on video. Had this occurred during “Normal Times,” you and I know the painful truth: We would have said, “That’s awful,” and gone on with our day. Gotta get to Whole Foods before they close. Sliced mango! There’s a sale at J. Crew. I have a meeting at WeWork. Perhaps we would have donated and tweeted a bit about the injustice of it all. Trust me, I am not proud of that, nor would I have been the first one at the J. Crew sale or eating mango, but I am doing my best to be as raw and honest as this moment demands of all of us.

What is different — and wildly significant — is the context of his death. Nearly 90 days after the president declared a national emergency concerning the novel coronavirus, we now live in an alternate 2020. Not one where we’re living our “best lives ever” (#blessed), but one where over 100,000 Americans are dead, no national mourning has taken place, 40 million people are unemployed, and the majority of us remain trapped in our homes for months. It’s, as the latest memes tell us, 1918+1929+1968+2001 — all divided by 1619. What exactly did we think would happen here? Were we all going to go back to life and work like it was the Tuesday after the longest three-day weekend of our lives? The chanting on the street may be “no justice, no peace,” but the Black community is really leading us all in saying: “We are not going back to Normal. Sorry, folks, Normal didn’t work.” The civil unrest is not in tandem with the pandemic; it’s because of the pandemic.

Why? Because when our masks went on, the veil lifted. And what we have seen has changed us. How could it not? In the bright light of day, we had to confront the uncomfortable truth of who we are as Americans: consumers. What a horrific discovery March and April brought us: When we stop shopping, it all falls apart within weeks. The $1,200 check you got was not to save your household. It was to save the economy. Those are two very different things, with two very different intentions, and two very different beneficiaries. When the machine is roaring, and you’re spending, you are a consumer first and citizen second. And that’s exactly how the Big Forces like it. Right now, we are seeing that they will do anything to get that machine back up and running.

It’s why Big Business and the Big White House — one now assaulting us with endless sappy social distancing commercials, the other with the National Guard — want you constantly consuming, ever busy, relentlessly tired, exhausted from the pinging and the ringing and from your kids and calendar. Because when we are engrossed consumers, we stop paying attention to our responsibilities as citizens. We forgo them. We neglect them. We think someone else will handle them. And the weeds in our collective garden grow. As I said in my first essay, “We do care. We just don’t have the time to do anything about it.” Well, guess what. Now we have the time. We’re not distracted by our usual economic pursuits, our “spending patterns,” and the pure inertia of expanding our “HHI” (household income). The pandemic took away the constant distraction and created the space for us to become citizens again. And it’s ugly but beautiful.

How did this happen?

In the story of America, we started as citizens. “We the people,” not “We the customers.” But somewhere along the way, our primary role changed. We became consumers first and citizens second. You could say it likely happened after World War II, as our new position as an international powerhouse opened up the window for American capitalism to go into serious overdrive. We started making more and more and more. And Madison Avenue brilliantly sold it all, to all of America, and then to the world. Some tried their best to stop it in the ’60s and ’70s. “Flower power” was, at its core, anti-consumerist, even if savvy corporate tastemakers eventually co-opted it. But the ’80s brought us “greed is good,” and Reagan’s America was no longer interested in dulling any of the might of the U.S. economy.

The promise? Don’t worry. It will trickle down to you. False. It didn’t. (Well, just enough to dangle that carrot forever.) But greed was in vogue, along with popped collars and spandex, and the upward climb continued right through the ’90s, the decade of American millionaire-making. But this world-changing event happened in 2001 when terror came to our doorstep, and our American bubble popped. And in the debris of it all, former President George W. Bush told us that our patriotic duty was to shop. “We cannot let the terrorists,” he said, “achieve the objective of frightening our nation to the point where we don’t conduct business, where people don’t shop.”

And that’s when it happened, at least for my generation. That was the moment when the order of our public roles in American life switched. Our government was not calling on us to be active citizens. As millions mourned their neighbors and friends, our leader told us that our primary role in society was as active consumers. If we wanted to defeat the terrorists, we had to go out and shop. Bush and Dick Cheney knew full well that if we actively engaged in our role as citizens, we just might question why we invaded Iraq, why we hired private armies to do our bidding, why one of the largest transfers of wealth happened from the public sector to the private, and why we avoided the very question at the core of the tragedy: Why would someone fly planes into our towers? It’s a question, even 20 years later, we refuse to answer honestly.

Marry that pivotal moment with the explosion of the internet, Wi-Fi, iPhones, and Amazon, and you get capitalism in complete hyper mode. Worse, without knowing it, we learned a dangerous collective lesson: When we hurt most, when we feel most broken, when despair drags on us, and we just plain feel like shit, the answer is to buy something. Click. Shopping will make us feel better. Is it any wonder that a 350,000-square-foot mall now exists below the site of the 9/11 attacks? We couldn’t just peacefully mourn our fallen people. We had to build a Westfield. The year 2001 set the stage for who we have become over the last 20 years: consumers first, citizens second.

We took the wrong road after 9/11, and it has led us here, to a frightening 2020, where people are looting — yep, you guessed it — Madison Avenue. Are we really so shocked? We have spent billions of dollars to make a Chanel bag mean power, love, happiness, status, and success. We did this. They don’t want the damned Chanel bag. They want what the Chanel bag means, what it represents. Or they want to sell that Chanel bag to someone else who assigns it enough of that same value that they can then pay their rent. Looters and buyers are both stuck in a system that cannot get them any of those things without that looter climbing through broken glass to snatch a small black “Caviar Quilted Medium Double Flap.”

And so what we are witnessing is the reordering of our public priorities. We see a return to citizenship. I know; you’re laughing. But that’s what this is. Oh, it’s ugly, yes. Really, really ugly. Because we are woefully out of practice.

On top of that, we have many young people who have very little idea what they’re doing. And what they have seen is David Hogg’s life threatened, Greta Thunberg mocked, and Colin Kaepernick blackballed. They have learned that peaceful protest doesn’t work. They want to take political action, but some instead are just taking the Chanel bag. We’re confused: Are they protesting or looting? Most of them (of us) are peacefully protesting, but some are equally confused. We haven’t raised all of our people to be responsible citizens. We have only built people to be voracious consumers. We haven’t invested in their education — neither their political education nor their civic education. And in the absence of that education, the weakest will default to what they know: Steal the bag, it’s worth something. That’s on us as a nation. Do not read me wrong: I’m not defending these criminal acts. I’m just asking you to stop clutching your pearls when you see them.

So, this will be very painful. Very confusing. And very long. But it’s the only thing that will save us. If we all expect to pursue happiness, “achieve the American dream,” and lead lives full of satisfaction, joy, and meaning, this reordering must occur. We have to become citizens first, consumers second. Citizenship calls us to be connected, to debate, to find solutions, and to work together to make our communities and our world a better place. Yes, the market can do a lot. It is powerful. It can create jobs and raise the standard of living. It can transform cities and towns and make (some of) us rich and make us all very comfortable. But it’s about time we admit what it cannot do: replace the deeper happiness and satisfaction we all get from working together toward a better world for ourselves and our kids.

I walked in solidarity with #BlackLivesMatter protestors here in New York City. As I stepped into the crowd, I could feel this to be true: The descendants of the very people who sowed the fields of our nation’s first economic boom are now leading us into our next chapter 400 years later. I came home humbled, hopeful, moved, and overwhelmed. For the very first time in my White, highly educated, type-A life, I thought perhaps I didn’t need to lead right now. Perhaps I could follow. Perhaps we can all follow. We should thank the Black community for leading the way because they have the least to lose. But they are speaking for all of us, for you and me. And the faster we realize it, the better chance we have to save this country. They say the status quo just isn’t good enough. They say we cannot go back to Normal.

Normal doesn’t work. We want something better.

Yes, it is a time of great change in our nation. But do not fear. We are not succumbing to our own decline. This is not the end of our great society. America is not over. Rightfully so, we are desperately trying to draw any parallels we can — to the ’60s, to MLK, to the ’92 Los Angeles riots — so that we can somehow predict what’s coming. But this time is different, and we know it. And so in the absence of a solid prediction, we resort to the narrative of collapse. Because that’s what we have seen before in other places — you can’t possibly sustain looting and rioting and not completely fall apart. The uncertainty scares us so much that we would instead call the game over and say “America is a failed experiment” rather than lead each other into the uncharted space of a post-quarantine New Normal. Well, Black people are leading us there. They are taking the first bold steps into the void. And we must follow.

We’re witnessing the next act in the story of America, my friends. It’s the birth of the next chapter, a rebirth of our nation. We had our time at home to find our truths. We used The Great Pause to think about what works for our families and us, and what just doesn’t. And for too many of us, we watched our friends and loved ones die without so much as a basic funeral. This is what’s next. This is what collective transformation looks like. Yes, it’s unpleasant to behold, even repulsive. But when was birth a pretty sight? We should only hope that the months ahead bring more protest, more outspokenness, more calls for us all to rise to this unprecedented moment in history. May this social unrest find its clarity. May it struggle through its process to discover its most forceful voice. And may that voice speak for all of us.

This is Part III of a series based on the essay “Prepare for the Ultimate Gaslighting,” which went viral around the world, with more than 20 million readers. Read or listen to Part I here. Read Part II here.