American values? No thanks!

An international school in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, is alert to the wariness of parents over the negatives of  American culture.

Certainly the regular massacres of young people, whether in schools or in inner city neighbourhoods that have become a feature of life in the United States, won't help to make American culture attractive in the rest of the world. The Uvalde, Texas, slaughter of 19 children and two teachers two days ago only adds to the dismay felt by those who used to have a high regard for Americans, but who now view them as obese, psychologically fragile, and hyper-individualistic — the last characteristic underpinning the general inaction in controlling access to guns and in ensuring social safety.

Evil lurks in every society, but successful cultures take action to control the sources of harm. Although Vietnamese young people are enamoured of American creativity and its gadgetry, they know it's wise to hold to traditional values such as solidarity as expressed through a multitude of community-centred activities. Another value they uphold is that of education, along with the self-discipline entailed in attaining a high level of achievement. For that reason, respect for teachers is made manifest on November 20, Teachers' Day, in many touching ways, appealing to the likes of myself, a former teacher.

But let Americans tell it like it is. In response to the Uvalde massacre, Bari Weiss, a former journalist and editor on the Wall Street Journal and New York Times, now the writer of social commentary, comes down hard on Americans for the dysfunctional society they have created, both through negligence of the common good, and the pollution of morality by the institutional and corporate imposition of new sets of virtue such as Critical Race Theory and the socially transformative trans ideology.

In a column titled "American madness", Weiss writes:

The elementary school shooting in Texas is the 212th mass shooting this year. It is the 27th school shooting. It is also the deadliest mass shooting in the U.S. so far in 2022, which says something because it happened just 10 days after 10 people were killed in a Buffalo, N.Y., supermarket. At least so far, 19 children and two adults are dead in Uvalde. Others are injured.

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There is a deep sickness in this country. It goes beyond our addiction to guns. It’s an anti-social, anti-human disease that has gripped our society and our politics.

A big part of that disease is how numb we have become to violence. The country has been experiencing the largest crime surge in decades. Armed robberies are up. Shoplifting is up. Road deaths are up. Car break-ins are so common in some cities that people leave notes on their windows to the thieves that nothing is inside.

But the most devastating rise has been in murders. Since the FBI started tracking the data, 2020 marked the highest single-year increase in homicides. In 2021, it went up again.

As of 2020, the leading cause of death among children in America is guns. Not cars. Not drugs. Guns. It was also the year that we had the highest rate of gun sales in American history.

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The social rot that’s come over America, the nihilism and hatred of each other, is part of the cause here. The dissolution of our social ties—and with them the accountability and responsibility that an actual community demands—has allowed insanity to fester unnoticed. Lockdowns accelerated the isolation, the purposelessness, the lack of meaning that was already overcoming us.

If we insist on viewing this shooting as part of some isolated issue or species of violence, then we miss the point. The point is the country is being consumed by what Philip Roth famously called “the indigenous American berserk”. It stretches back many decades, or longer, and for ages, it was possible to ignore or compartmentalize. Now the brokenness is everywhere we look and it is impossible to unsee it.

Vietnamese parents know such a psychologically poisonous and unsafe society is not a fit model for their children. They want their young ones to be exposed to Western/American customs and manners, but they are wary because the daily news tells them of the trouble at the heart of those societies. They despair when a young person in their extended family goes too far in pursuit of "freedom" and self-invention. They enjoy the cultivation of individual talents, but a lack of restraint is frowned upon in the comment in newspapers because people share a fear for the welfare of the person involved and the risk to social relationships.

In comments made to AP News last week, before the latest massacre in Uvalde, Gregg Gonsalves, an epidemiologist and professor at Yale, said:

I think the evidence is unmistakable and quite clear. We will tolerate an enormous amount of carnage, suffering and death in the U.S., because we have over the past two years. We have over our history.

Likewise, Elizabeth Wrigley-Field, a sociology professor at the University of Minnesota who studies mortality, is quoted as saying that there are profound racial and class inequalities in the United States, and Americans' tolerance of death is partly based on who is at risk. She continues:

Some people’s deaths matter a lot more than others. And I think that’s what we’re seeing in this really brutal way with this coincidence of timing.

Martha Lincoln, an anthropology professor at San Francisco State University who studies the cultural politics of public health, spoke about the grotesque lack of gun control:

“I don’t think that most Americans feel good about it. I think most Americans would like to see real action from their leaders in the culture about these pervasive issues,” [...] and who adds that there is a similar “political vacuum” around COVID-19.

The AP journalist states:

The high numbers of deaths from COVID-19, guns and other causes are difficult to fathom and can start to feel like background noise, disconnected from the individuals whose lives were lost and the families whose lives were forever altered.

American society has even come to accept the deaths of children from preventable causes.

[...] pediatrician Dr. Mark W. Kline pointed out that more than 1500 children have died from COVID-19, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, despite the “myth” that it is harmless for children. Kline wrote that there was a time in pediatrics when “children were not supposed to die”.

“There was no acceptable pediatric body count,” he wrote. “At least, not before the first pandemic of the social media age, COVID-19, changed everything.”

This AP roundup of statistics on mass deaths in the US is an eye-opener as to how a society can become morally hardened and politicians abdicate responsibility for leading a challenge to a way of life that tolerates the loss of lives in large numbers:

💢 More than 1 million Americans have died from COVID-19.
💢An estimated 100,000 people are shot every year and some 40,000 die.
💢 Nearly 43,000 people died on the US’s roads last year, the highest level in 16 years.
💢 An estimated 24,000 gun suicides year compared with 19,000 homicides.
💢 More than 107,000 Americans died of drug overdoses in 2021, setting a record.
💢 Let me add that there were about 629,898 abortions in 2019, a typical year.

Dr. Megan Ranney of Brown University’s School of Public Health describes a frustrating “learned helplessness”, adding that:

There’s been almost a sustained narrative created by some that tells people that these things are inevitable.

It divides us when people think that there’s nothing they can do.

It’s not that we put less value on an individual life, but rather we’re coming up against the limits of that approach. Because the truth is, is that any individual’s life, any individual’s death or disability, actually affects the larger community.

The state of personal welfare in the United States is also impacted by working conditions, with the latest attack on employees being to cynically offer unlimited annual leave, with well-endowed managers knowing the fear of losing their job will force employees into an almost nil-leave culture. A second sign of the employer versus employee conflict embedded in the US culture is the difficulty displayed again over recent months when workers try to organise for union protection.

There is much to admire about Americans, but it is clear that American culture, at home, is poisonous through its nihilism, lack of self-awareness, and embrace of toxic individualism; and abroad, it is arrogantly assertive in the typical tone-deaf manner — except for one culturally sensitive school in Ho Chi Minh City.

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