The Minute Progress Becomes Political, You Can Kiss Your Country Good-bye.

Right after the Civil War, St. Louis was the place to be. There was a victory mood in the air. The city’s staunchly anti-slavery and pro-Union Germans had kept it, and the rest of Missouri, out of the Confederacy, and their side had won. Progress was ascendant. The town was booming—all kinds of stuff was flowing down the river to rebuild the South, people were going west in greater numbers than ever before and passing through the Gateway City on their way to do it, and all that commerce was generating unheard of amounts of wealth. The city was the fourth largest in the United States. There was serious talk of moving the U.S. capital from DC to St. Louis. City boosters like Logan Reavis wrote books like, “St. Louis—The Future Great City of the World,” in which he predicted that St. Louis, the great city at the very center of the greatest country in the world, would quite possibly grow into the greatest city in the history of the species. The future was so bright you had to wear shades. St. Louis had nowhere to go but up.

Or so it thought. But something happened. The mood of the city changed, a shift in mindset best expressed by St. Louis’ postwar mayor, German-born Henry Overstolz, who shot down a proposal to install streetlights by saying, “Vell, ve got a moon, ain’t it?”

What happened? Complacency and politics set in. St. Louis turned up its nose at the railroads—no one could imagine that the river, the original source of the city’s wealth, could ever be superseded by the Iron Horse—and let Chicago take the lead on that one. Things were good enough, weren’t they? Why change anything? Why install streetlights? Ve got a moon, ain’t it?

The city became conservative and rigid, with predictable results. The 1880 census revealed that St. Louis’s hated rival to the north, Chicago, had overtaken St. Louis in population. It was a body blow to city’s collective ego. Chicago continued to blow its doors off in every conceivable way. And my city began the long, slow decline to where it is now—a second-tier Midwestern city with nothing particularly remarkable about it. The city, once flush and vibrant with immigrants—in 1860, over half the adult population was foreign-born—ceased to become a destination for new Americans. Right now, it’s got the lowest percentage of foreign-born residents of any major metro area in the U.S. And it shrank. The City of St. Louis has lost population in every census since 1950, and the metro area is now 19^th in terms of population.

And as went St. Louis, I fear, so goes the United States.

There have been prophets of doom foretelling the country’s downfall since before the country even existed, and it’s possible that, at the age of 42, I’m falling into the thought patterns of the elderly, insisting that things used to be better, but they suck now. Could be. But I just can’t shake the feeling that the U.S. has peaked, and that the long, slow decline has now set in.

I’m starkly reminded of this every time I read another article about how Denmark, Germany, Norway, and China and India are passing us by in alternate energy research and implementation. Twenty-two percent of Germany’s energy now comes from renewables—a quarter of that comes from solar power. The country is the leading photovoltaics installer in the world. The Germans have even more ambitious plans: 50% of their energy will come from solar power by 2020, and 100% by 2050.

The Danes are right there with them. They have also set themselves the goal of being completely independent of oil by 2050. India’s not far behind, either. The country is a leader in wind power as well as solar—its growth rate for wind-generated energy use is the fastest in the world. China’s also kicking our asses. Seventeen percent of China’s energy comes from renewable resources, and it has the world’s largest number of hydroelectric generators.

Watching the rest of the world move this direction should be deeply embarrassing to every American. Especially when we find ourselves still mired in two wars, Iraq and Afghanistan, which have precisely dick to do with our national security, and everything to do with controlling Mideast oil reserves. Especially when we’re still convulsing ourselves over whether the Keystone XL pipeline should be built, even after a disastrous Exxon pipeline leak in Arkansas shows that oil pipelines are nothing more than environmental disasters waiting to happen. Especially when the Gulf is still recovering from the catastrophic BP oil spill. Especially when we’re so desperate for oil that we’re now reduced to squeezing the shit, drop by drop, out of tar sands and seriously considering “fracking”—pumping high-pressure caustic chemicals (including lead, mercury, hydrochloric acid, and a bitches’ brew of other toxins) into our groundwater in hopes of busting open the shale to get the natural gas inside.

And while the rest of the developed world blows our doors off in science and math education, we in the United States continue to wrestle with whether or not we should give horseshit nonsense like “Creationism” and “Intelligent Design,” which is unmitigated nonsense for numbskulls, equal time in public schools along with the Theory of Evolution. Essentially, we’re arguing over whether we should make ourselves stupider than ever.

I genuinely don’t know why this is the case. I don’t know what turned the country of entrepreneurialism and innovation into a country where adherence to outmoded, worn-out, and frankly ridiculous modes of thought is almost religious. I don’t know what turned the country of Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and Jonas Salk into the country of Donald Trump.

It’s possible complacency and smug self-satisfaction had something to do with it. Maybe we just drank our own Kool-Aid about being the biggest, the fastest, the richest, the toughest, and the coolest for so long that we figured the rest of the world would never catch up, and we could sit on our laurels. But I suspect the real cause is more pernicious than that.

Money gets into politics, and then suddenly, somehow, things that just shouldn’t be political got politicized.

Take energy, for example. I cannot, for the life of me, understand why oil is a political issue. But it is. Conservatives love it, liberals hate it. But I see no good reason why energy should be a right-left divide. If you’re using something that’s toxic, causes cancer, takes zillions to get out of the ground, involves your country in fatal adventures overseas, and which you’re running out of, then looking around for another energy source shouldn’t be a political issue. It should be common sense. It is the height of stupidity to remain dependent upon oil. But oil producers got involved in conservative politics, and suddenly, oil fetishizing became identified with conservatism. Conservatives abandoned common sense, adopted oil dependence as one of their shibboleths, and now viciously attack anything that calls oil production or consumption into question. Drill, baby, drill! Build that pipeline! Or else you hate America.

How about eating healthy? Not eating pink slime—ground-up, shit-containing, ammonia-treated meat—shouldn’t be a political issue. This should be an issue on which every American can agree. It’s utterly disgusting, as well as dangerous. We shouldn’t be eating it. We shouldn’t allow this abomination against our bodies to even be produced.

But food production is big money, and you can use big money to buy off elected officials. Once again, something utterly vile and stupid became identified with conservatism, and conservatives, once again, abandoned common sense and now scorn and deride those of us who’d prefer our hamburgers to be shit- and ammonia-free as a bunch of latte-drinking, effete elitists.

The problem is that the powers that be—the corporations that control American politics—have a vested interest in keeping things just the way they are. They don’t want change. They’re doing just fine. And they can afford to buy off our parties and our politicians, who have now turned the engines of their donors’ profits into sacred articles of conservative faith.

I can't, however, through all the blame on conservatives. Those of us on the left have done important causes--causes that should not be political issues--a great disservice by turning them into political issues. We've claimed the monopoly on environmentalism, sensible gun control, healthy eating, healthcare, GMO labeling, and a myriad of other issues. These shouldn't be liberal issues. These should be issues that all Americans should care about, and about which all Americans should be able to reach consensus. But by painting these issues with the "liberal" brush--or by allowing them to have become liberal issues--we've pushed tons of potential supporters away. 

The end result is that the idea of progress itself has become political. Instead of leading the world in innovation, big chunks of America now actively hold it back. Now the very idea of moving forward is under attack. Science is either discredited or ignored, innovation is viewed as suspect, and anything that could possibly lead to the betterment of the species is attacked with all the ferocity of a pit bull on HGH. Far too many Americans are terrified of progress. We used to delight in discovery. Now we’re afraid of it. It’s a pathetic thing to see the country that used to set the standard for the rest of the world in technological achievement become a bunch of sniveling cowards, terrified of the future and doing our best to keep it at bay.

Throw this phenomenon into the mix along with a healthy dose of complacency and smugness about your incontestable, eternal “We’re Number One” status, and you have a recipe for decline. Which is what America is doing.

I suppose there’s an odd comfort to be taken, though. I suppose as the lights dim over what used to be the greatest country in the world, we can take refuge in the fact that “Vell, we still got a moon, ain’t it?”