Becoming stronger

Muscles build strength through a process of injury, repair, and renewal. At a physiologic level, exercises aimed at enhanced muscle size, definition, and power produce results because properly performed exercise causes individual cellular damage, stimulating muscle cells and fibers to fuse, forming in turn new myofibrils that are larger and more capable than what preceded them. Growth happens as a result of individual cell damage and the overall body’s innate recovery and improvement processes. A bicep that is prudently challenged becomes a bicep that is more capable.

The contemporary era does not appear to be challenging us with anything that resembles prudence. Chaotic stressors assault our personal and collective sensoria with reckless and feckless abandon. Some days it feels exhausting to live. The modern world has certainly seen its share of horrors in the past century. Never before, however, have we seemed thrust to face such a series of regular crises without consistent voices of reason, compassion, and character in the public sphere. Social media, with its advertisement-influenced algorithms for how people are exposed to “news”, is manipulated to spread lies. Politicians seem unable to hold our highest offices with integrity and moral balance. As a nation, we seem to have broken loose from our mooring. Ideals are relegated to the realm of relativism. A sense of, and commitment to, the basic “common good” quickly slides towards the antiquated. In short, we are overusing our muscle cells of individuality and so-called personal freedoms such that they have no opportunity to repair, to remodel into something functional and more useful. And so those selfish and self-centered cells just fire, haphazardly, indiscriminately, their noisy flares managed and misshaped by forces and people with often ruinous, even nefarious purpose. Regretfully, the flames of acrimony left burning across our value landscape are fanned, and deliberately fused, by those who would not see us collectively become better but would rather let us injure and damage our individual perceptions and abilities beyond easy recovery, leaving us weak, morally rudderless, socially confused, and more easily subject to unbalanced, devastating influence and misdirection.

There are real forces of destruction at loose in our world. They are embodied by those who would divide versus unite us, those who would sour our beliefs in common goals and purpose, those who would convince you, me, and our neighbors that we are taxpayers instead of citizens, residents rather than community members, takers and not givers.

Our moral fiber has been overstretched and battered. We must not let it be remodeled in ways we no longer recognize.

A few days ago, I received an email from a high school classmate urging me, respectfully, to look past our incumbent President and administration’s “style” and focus on “results”: unemployment rates, gross domestic product (GDP), and average family income. My former classmate expressed concern for what world might be left his children and future generations if we allow “socialists” to replace the “world (he) knew” with the “radical alternative”.

To my classmate I respond as follows: please review the definition of respect. I have witnessed enough radical denial of basic rights, values, and dignities in recent years to recognize villainy masquerading as style. Ends do not justify means. Even if they did, I would rather live in a world where values refer to higher purpose, balance and the social fabric, decency and collective goals as opposed to GDP and some abstraction known as the average family income. My children do not need to strive towards an increase in our family’s income from our generation to the next; blessed by the birth lottery, they have, and likely will continue to have, plenty. Instead of measuring their lives’ worth through economic factors and personal income, I hope that they will devote themselves to some notion of collective wellbeing and growth, re-reading our country’s Declaration of Independence and Constitution not as documents meant to be entombed in history but as large breaths of hope and idealism for their generation and future generations to come. Social good and a commitment to a social contract is not some dystopian “socialist” nightmare. It is the basis for social living. And humans, as we all learned in high school, are social animals.

It is time we rebuilt the muscles of decency, respect, and diversity in America. The brawn and bluster of bigotry and individualistic “me first” idolatry weakens us, tearing at the fabric and fiber of us as people, preventing us, like abused muscles, from rebound, recovery, and renewal. Let us learn to exercise ourselves and our values differently. Let us not succumb to the value-free relativism of despotic and calculated views of the past. We can embrace our shortcomings (we have them, yes), we can learn from our mistakes (we have made and continue to make them, yes), and we can become stronger: as a people.

For as it says in the very first words of the preamble to the U.S. Constitution: “We, the people of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, ensure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

Muscle cells that do not request and receive the help of other cells around them die. Cells that recruit and receive help, that merge and grow together, become fibers with strength, vital contributors to something better, something redesigned by common purpose, something so much more capable. Together, with the right purpose and effort, we can build with dignity and respect for all. As one, as a people committed to a more perfect Union, we can yet become stronger.