Merriam-Webster defines the word loyalty as “the quality or state or an instance of being loyal” and for convenience, the word loyal as “unswerving in allegiance: such as: 1) faithful in allegiance to one’s lawful sovereign or government, 2) faithful to a private person to whom faithfulness is due, 3) faithful to a cause, ideal, custom, institution, or product.” Americans are loyal, but not necessarily to their government (they’re dependent upon it). We are loyal to capitalism and to the corporations that made it.
In this country, we are more divided than ever, as citizens who think our responsibility is to vote for government leaders. We forget that our government is US (that’s not an acronym for the “United States,” that is the word “us” in upper-case). WE, YOU, I, everyone who is a U.S. citizen, green-card holders, even aliens can be a part of our government. Our government is made up of regular people off the street. The people you see inside government are the people who have media coverage and usually the voice, the money, or appear in some sort of protest and have gotten attention. The people you call on the phone, handle your VA insurance bills, those are the people of government working hard away, like my own mother who handles billing. Anyway, most of government is not high-status people with power. In fact, our government is designed to limit power of people so our government can maintain control of itself.
Certain things have gone unchecked though, and one of them is loyalty. You see, although our country works hard, we are so focused on economic growth, GDP, continued inflation to make ourselves feel good, and inventing new technology because of programs in the 60s and 70s that I have talked about that encouraged computer technology to evolve, we have become so focused on hard work as individuals to promote growth to our country and the rest of the world, that we have forgotten just how much we have even contributed to the rest of the world. Ironically enough, wireless technology is one of them, the FCC protects bandwidth in this country that auctions for billions of dollars to protect it for companies to be able to license it for use with technology that has been developed to promote greater freedom and flexibility of communicating with phones and tablets.
However, while we work to develop technology we have: 1) Forgotten about ourselves as a country, 2) somewhat ignored our commonplace ease of communicating for distractions like YouTube, Facebook, X, Instagram, and TikTok, 4) and lastly, forgotten about our proper obligations to our country.
Political debates should be discourse about philosophy, not literal things like how to cut Medicare and spending, and then saying “Here’s what we don’t like about your plan” then basically ignoring that and doing what you want to anyway, and then waiting until a government shutdown of near record lengths, and going, well nobody wants to work in our government, so we’ll just dilly-dally at the mall or something while the “other side” figures out what to do. Recent new articles about how we treat Canada is a perfect example of WHY our country is divided: it was designed to be. Unfortunately, there is not much we can do about this without recreating an entirely new government, more or less. Never ending protests are allowed, however, not really productive when only certain people can protest, and the voices of so many people get dissolved into oblivion for not speaking out in ways that can matter. Hence the point of my website. I enjoy writing and I can do it with relatively little cost to myself and in a more productive way than arguing with someone on Facebook. However, that is lost of many people who don’t have the technical ability to be able to do that as easily and as cheaply.
Many people in our country are good, hard working people who just want to live a quiet peaceful life. But remember what it says on the New Hampshire license plate: “Live free or die.” If you don’t want to live in our country, you must pay the price to defend it. But from what, exactly, and why? Drafts are sometimes mandatory, so what if the military is so large and powerful that you have no choice but to be a part of it and support a country you don’t agree with politically?
I once had this idea that the military is to defend government, and the people who run it. That is why power is limited, which is good in the case of the current president. Unfortunately, that’s another oversight, that an impeached president can’t be removed without conviction (which could potentially become “reverse stonewalling” by a political party), but that’s not the point of this article. It’s loyalty. Americans get lazy with what they have because at the end of their job, if they even have to go home (work a remote job after COVID still?), we can turn on the TV and watch the news. Remember, we ARE the news, so we post it on Facebook, but Facebook is full of ads, groups that promote their causes and appear mixed in with your family’s posts, and the like. With increased social media, kids are exposed to technology at younger ages that only recently they’ve had access to cheaply enough and predominantly enough that research is ongoing about how it will affect generations to come, and so on. I’ve written already that we’re so inundated by information that it’s hard to focus outside of a very specialized niche of a career in our lives. So, what is to say, government will only become larger, which is the opposite of what what intended by our founders, to create a working government that can support our population?
I think there’s no doubt that government does a good job, but it’s not necessarily a contiguous plot from the United States that keeps things stable. People pay attention to what they want to, but in this world, there is so much to see and do, that takes so much time to understand, that without focus, the next word I’ll define, you can’t pay attention well enough quickly to absorb that information. Focus, defined by Merriam-Webster is “a center of activity, attraction, or attention.” Part of the problem with focus is the ability of information to be manipulated on computers with the technology that in present time has already been developed and works: not even AI, but what I’ll refer to as “marketing algorithms.” TV commercials, ads on websites and the radio, billboards, are selected based on data that can even be detected right from your own computer’s browsing habits and recorded, logged, and manipulated into an area, even your own computer, to refer you to information that a business owner thinks you might find interesting, usually to pay for (to cover the cost of the advertisement), just so they can get some business. Usually the goal of a business is to expand and grown, because, for some reason, that is the real focus in our country.
Why our country still needs to become the “greatest” with Trump’s “Make America great again” campaign is correct, but not in that sense. Countries don’t really fight over borders anymore without wars, because long ago was when the land area on Planet Earth was taken up by human civilization. Until space travel becomes a thing, we’re stuck where we are. Though there are movies that predict planets will be property that companies will claim for money is probably true, if there are habitable planets outside of our galaxy, I’m straying. We are a great country, but let’s focus more on things in front of us like being social with each other and getting along.
Instead of saying, “here’s what I don’t like about your government spending plan,” or “I refuse” and not even saying anything, maybe you should realize that if WE don’t talk, we don’t need freedom of speech either, because if you don’t say anything, you aren’t even taking advantage of your freedom to say something. Say it properly and respectfully, and cooperate with other people. Philosophy may not be prosperous in our country, but LGBTQ+ is not philosophy, it’s biology, and not necessarily productive either. We don’t have time for sex in a planet with so many people. Remember, in other countries, having children is a penalty. In U.S. society, having children can be seen as an incentive due to tax deductions as dependents. This is backwards and even possibly immoral. Our focus is not populating the planet so we can marry and have sex. It’s to support ourselves reliably and grow by raising children properly and continuing our country. Most people are loyal to their children. Treat your government like a child thats much older than even your grandchildren are or could be. That’s loyalty.
Children are a biological instinct of every species on this planet. If you can’t treat your government like a child, you have no instinct to protect your government either. Also, remember, government is there to protect you in the case that something else needs to be there to protect us. However, most of the time, our country should be free to do what it wants. War is not something we use unless we need to protect ourselves. That’s a different topic.