“’Cause they told me when I was younger
Said boy, you’re gonna be president
But just like everything else
Those old crazy dreams
Just kinda came and went.”
—Quoted material by John Mellencamp.

ROLLING FORK—Folks of my generation, just like those of others before us, are wont to lament, from time to time: “This is just not the country I grew up in.” Because it is not.

In some ways, almost all of them technologically-related, it is a better country, but in a whole lot of other ways, it is a lesser one. Or, at least, that is the pretty widely held perception—and that has led, and continues to lead to a great deal of angst.

On one of the Sunday talk shows, pollster Peter Hart was asked what he thought was fueling the current political climate—one that has produced what can most kindly be called the unorthodox candidacies of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders.

“I think it is one-third anger and two-thirds anxiety,” Hart answered.

And I think he’s on to something, there. People are mad and people are anxious—about their lives, the lives of their kids and grandkids and the state of the country in which they live.

Collectively, a majority of people in this country of ours are simply ready to pull a Howard Beal: They want to metaphorically stick their heads out of windows and scream, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not gonna take it anymore!”

Because nothing makes sense, anymore. Americans no longer feel as though they are in control of their own lives, much less their destinies. Rather, the average man and woman in this country—not without cause—perceive themselves to be at the whims of forces upon which they effectively have no way to act. They feel, in the more and more prophetic appearing words of Joni Mitchell, as if they are “cogs in something turning.”

Our politics are, in a word, insane. More than at any other time during my 64 years, Americans are balkanized, divided into a pair of  ideological tribes, appearing less like those with philosophical differences and more like warring camps, with no room for compromise and no prisoners to be taken.

From “out of many, one,” we have devolved into “us against them.” The nation that grew and thrived and became the leader of the free world largely due to the vitality of its middle class, has witnessed one of the greatest reallocations of wealth in the history of the western world.

The United States of America today is a nation of “haves” and “have nots.” The American dream, referenced by the songwriter quoted above, the notion that if a fellow worked hard and played by the rules he could get ahead, the notion that somebody’s kid could grow up to attain the highest office in the land, has faded into virtual obscurity, no longer meaningful in a land where elections are bought and sold, with politicians wholly owned and corporations judicially declared to be equal to citizens.

It doesn’t seem fair because it isn’t. But then, as my grandfather rather sagely advised me many years ago,

“Sonny Boy, a fair is something with clowns and rides. Life ain’t fair.”

The great European historian Alexis de Tocqueville came here in the 1830s to view first-hand the then still fledging experiment in representative democracy and after spending time observing and delving into institutions rather famously concluded, “America is great because America is good.”

He was, of course, making a comparison through his own experience, coming from a continent full of monarchies and family dynasties, but still it was a perception shared by most, if not all in this country, as well.

And so I wonder—amid the political chaos, wealth inequality, seemingly perpetual warfare, prevailing frustration, indeed, among the anger and anxiety—what might that great man conclude about us today?

We are, by many measures, still a nation that is “great.” But “good?” “But ain’t that America
For you and me?”

(Ray Mosby is publisher of The Deer Creek Pilot in Rolling Fork.)