Blog Post #45: Changing the American Culture

Change is not an easy thing, even if it’s for the better. Our present culture encourages abuse of other human beings and of our environment in general, and our climate in particular. To do this, we will need to focus on what is best for our country, and not for ourselves. For many Americans, that’s a hard one. As a country, we need to grow up. Maybe after 250 years, we thought we had. But I don’t think we have. Many of us still believe that greed is good and that the amount of money we have and power that we have is what determines our value as human beings. Many of us believe that helping others is a nice thing to do if we have the time and the money to do so, without depriving ourselves of anything. Capitalism has been a good thing for many of us, but not for all of us. Racism and sexism continue to play a major role in our economy and our decision-making as a government. We as a country continue to elect leaders who will tell us who to vent our anger at, certainly not with the welfare of others or our country.

There are hard things to change since many of them seem to be baked into the infrastructure of our society. We need to elect leaders who believe these changes are necessary and will benefit all of us in the end. As John F. Kennedy said over 50 years ago, we need to ask what we can do for our country, not what our country can do for us. So much of this change has to do with how we educate our children in the role models that are out there. These do not encourage these values. In fact, they may encourage just the opposite.

Things are not well in our society or our country. We need to get actively involved in the change process. And we need to take the process very seriously. Are we a democracy or an autocracy? We need to do more than just give lip service to the values that we say we represent.

Ron Breazeale PhD

Clinical Psychologist