No, America isn’t ‘Lost’

This past week, I noticed the same article pop up on my newsfeed four separate times. It’s called “Enjoy your transgender bathrooms. We just lost America,” and it’s from something called the “New Boston Post,” which, contrary to what you may believe, is a conservative news sight, not a New England division of the UPS.

Normally, I have a policy of never reading anything from sources which state any kind of political bias, because ninety percent of the time it’s total garbage, but this one, with all its vague, end-of-the-world melodrama, caught my attention. Maybe it’s because I kept seeing it posted over and over, or maybe it’s because it’s one of those articles that I can’t stand, the one that gets away with attacking specific groups simply by hinting at a few points but never actually being brave enough to say them overtly. The writer, a Mr. Kyle S. Reyes, is filled with that age-old anxiety that conflict has created a “lost” America, something I wholeheartedly disagree with.

Reyes begins with the line “While you were fighting over who should use what bathrooms at Target, we lost our country.” Good punch opener. Ignoring the irony of a conservative news writer implying that he has nothing to do with the argument over transgender rights, it’s a pretty charged statement. Let’s read on and take a look at his reasoning.

Reyes continues with an appeal to our ethos, saying that the American dream is dead, and that he can “prove it all to you through the eyes of a child.” Erm, ok. This child turns out to be his daughter, and Reyes is afraid to bring her up in this world. There’s this weird, Orwellian description of “the television…the laptops…the iPads…the cell phones…filled with images of attacks around the world.” We get it. The world is a scary, scary place. Reyes’ pastor apparently understands this, too, because Reyes tells us that his priest talked about “the end of times” in his most recent sermon. Dark.

Here’s where the real fun begins.

Reyes wonders, “Have we ever faced a time when our country was so polarized?” (cough, cough, Civil war, cough, cough) and says that this polarization is caused by caring more about “protecting where someone can take a leak than…the safety of our children.” Also, shifty politicians, dangerous open borders, gun control, gender inclusivity, and a whole bunch of other super scary things, suggesting that America is somehow lost because it prioritizes certain things over others, as if the human brain is utterly incapable of caring about more than one thing at a time.

What bothers me about this article is Reyes’ implication that some issues are important and some are trivial, and that worrying about things that Reyes, himself, deems invalid is what leads to the collapse of the country. Newsflash: we can care about the rights of American citizens to pee where every we want AND worry about the well-being of our veterans. We can disagree about open borders while agreeing that destroying ISIS is a priority, and  we can worry about the mental health crisis while acknowledging that you shouldn’t be able to get a gun without any sort of background check, whether you’re mentally stable or not.

Reyes says he wants a “unified America” but what he really wants is an America that agrees with him, an America that doesn’t argue, even if that means some people’s voices are silenced. In his view, conflict leads to a lost nation. But the truth is that our nation has always had dissenters. The ability to oppose, to disagree, to rise up and have others rise up against you–it’s what the United States was founded upon, and what makes the country continue to grow. Division is a necessary reality in any country with millions of different viewpoints, and often it can lead to learning and progress, carrying us into new eras instead of leaving us stranded in the past.

So, Mr. Reyes, I’m here to tell you not to worry. Your daughter is going to be just fine, though she might grow up in a different America than you did, just as you were raised in a nation diverging from that of your parents’. She will learn new things and care about issues that you don’t understand, and she might even adopt opinions that are different than your own. That’s ok. That possibility, in my opinion, is the true American dream.