So how did America manage to get it so right? And why has it gone so wrong?

We ordinary Americans now stand red, white and screwed for this reason: because of a powerful, winner-take-all, all-controlling elite centered in this unholy trinity: big government, big business and big religion.

The fingerprints of this hyper-powerful, hyper-wealthy aggregation of “elite deviants” turn up repeatedly at the site of America’s economic disasters, societal imbalances and crimes against the republic’s ordinary people and their surroundings. The very rich and powerful now largely control our economy and corporations, our politics and our government, our media and many of our other institutions, including the so-called spiritual. The naked truth is this: to an ever-greater degree, America’s wealthiest and most pythonic have been running this country like it was their own personal Monaco-on-the-Potomac instead of supposedly the world’s most visible (and once most viable) democracy.

And more and more Americans are beginning to understand something else—something that the elite deviants don’t. And that is this:

Once upon a time, a parade of experimenters that stretches backwards into the mists of antiquity (and includes America’s founders) spent three or four thousand years trying to figure out how to make a society come together. And hang together. And thrive and strive always to do better for its citizens.

And figure it out they did!

They pretty much solved the big equations and argued out the fine points. They wrote it all down and passed it on. As a consequence, an extraordinary place called America appeared on the scene. This neophyte of a polity across the ocean blue—this outlander to the world’s established orders—had its ups and downs. Its doubts. Its discouraging moments. Its brushes big-time with disaster. And yet, by the second half of the 20th Century, America had proved something more convincingly than any other major society before it. America proved that the great theorists and experimenters of human organizing over the eons had, indeed, gotten it right.

And then what did we do?

National amnesia and broken pottery
In a mere heartbeat in historical time, we promptly forgot nearly everything we’d learned! This is such an astounding demonstration of national amnesia and irresponsibility that it bears repeating: we humans spent thousands of years figuring out how to create the best large-sized, self-renewing, fairest-to-all-concerned, ever-improving society the world had ever seen. And then, in a few short years, we Americans promptly forgot nearly everything the risk-takers and civic savants of the ages had taught us!

Forgot it!

Squandered our advantage, debased our achievements. Thumbed our noses at our planetary neighbors. Ignored our most vulnerable and poorest. Mechanized the “bio-cide” of our other earth-mate species. And then left our covenants and promises strewn across the commonweal of our once great land like so-much broken pottery, the needs, dreams and esprit of the majority of its citizens callously thrust aside.

We elevated corporations over individuals (by abandoning our anti-trust laws and watering down our laws and regulations and turning a blind eye to the egregious and never-ending misdeeds of giant companies).

We sold out our workers and their families (by allowing our unions to be destroyed and our companies to be sold to those with no interest and no stake in our country’s well-being and opening our borders profligately to predatory importers).

We thumbed our noses at poor people (by cutting or failing to fund the programs they depended on to stay healthy and try to improve their plight).

We made higher education ever more expensive (by letting college tuitions and fees soar and refusing to adequate public funding).

We permitted the dumbing down and debasement of our news media and what they report (by allowing extreme consolidation of ownership, allowing the media’s owners to meddle in the newsroom and removing requirements for fair use of the public’s airways).

We forgot what religion is really supposed to be about (by politicizing our religious institutions and building the walls between us and our neighbors of faith and unfaith ever higher).

We let our public places and shared spaces go to pot (by failing to maintain our infrastructure).

We poisoned the immense good will that many other peoples of the world held for us (by acting the bully and petulantly telling everyone else it was our way or the highway).

Repeatedly, endlessly, in public arena after sometimes not-so-public arena, egregious act after egregious act, farcical pseudo-drama after farcical pseudo-drama, we allowed the sharks of big business, big government and big religion to usurp our rights. Steal our money. Debase our heritage. And acutely endanger the possibility of seeing our national progress continue.

This is so unspeakably strange that we say it yet a third time. There were all these covenants, contracts, treaties, pledges, accord, concords, pacts and promises that have been honed and refined in the fires of history. They had passed the test of humanity’s accumulated wisdom. We had used them to create the framework for America. They became the basis for how we should treat each other—how we could and should live as a good, decent, free and just society. They were all in place, carved in stone, treasured, honored and working to an extraordinary degree. Then, in a few decades, they were nearly all tossed away. Ignored. Dishonored. Shat on.

Another empty promise … to our progeny
Above all, there was that one contract that was the most consecrated and most dear: our agreement with our children and our children’s children.

This was an idea that arrived very late in that multi-millennia journey of human and social development. It first required Western civilization to view its children differently. To view them as something other than as an asset to be used or a part-time amusement to be seen and not heard. Nowhere did the idea take deeper root than in America. Both soft-spokenly and full-throatedly, we, as a nation, pledged to our children that they would have a better life than have had we. They would inherit the fruits of our labors and our love. They would have more opportunities than had we. And they would go on to make something of themselves and be contributors to society and make life better for their children, too. That was our promise, our pledge.

And our pledge to them had always taken center stage in our society! It had been our greatest national pride. It had served as our most prized national mantra. We repeated it so often and so convincingly that it inspired hope and excitement for generations in peoples great distances removed. They may not have spoken our native tongue. They may not have known much about our geography. They may have only seen our movies and tasted our fast-food exports. But they understood our native pledge. They believed in the promise. And they responded time and again to its beckoning quality. This pledge, of course, was at the heart of the American Dream. A few short years ago, all that was in place and functioning well. Now, like all the others, this covenant, this promise, this ideal lies empty and despoiled.

In the 1950s and ‘60s—in retrospect, America’s Golden Age—a single full-time wage earner could support a family of four. Today, mom and dad both have to work, if there is work to be had; the percentage of permanently unemployed, long-term unemployed and underemployed in the U.S. today has edged past 45 percent.

Wealth is again centralizing to a dysfunctional degree. Public education is increasingly lackluster and underfunded. Healthcare is mediocre and overly expensive. Ordinary Americans are up to their necks in debt. To the extent that it has one, America’s social “safety net” is on life support and is constantly under attack as a “socialistic plot.” There is no longer a “Great Compression” replacing memories of The Great Depression with an expanding middle class but rather the Great Sucking Sound of money, jobs, opportunity and the American Dream fleeing the confines of our failing country. As Elizabeth Warren once noted on “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart,” “This is America’s middle class. We’ve hacked at it and pulled at it and chipped at it for 30 years now, and now there’s no more to do. We fix this problem going forward, or the game is over.”

Incoming: A Leviathan of Change
So, yes, indeedy. Your author is mad as hell! And, yes, I want to help initiate—and I want your help in initiating—a turnaround, a rebellion, a mutiny. A mutiny in the interest of returning to radical normal in America, the way we were when we had it right. A mutiny with a goal of reestablishing the kind of America, complete once again with The Dream, that you’d wish to bequeath to your children and grandchildren. An America that can once again endure, inspire, protect and demonstrate the best ideals and ideas of a civilization as a beacon for humankind everywhere.

As we’ve already argued, to have a prayer of achieving such an outcome, this country is direly in need of the counsel, inventiveness, ingenuity and leadership of a new kind of mind—that of the dolphin thinker.

Why?

Because there is no way to fix America—return it to radical normal and move it forward—without jolting it to its very core.

It will require spiriting sizable numbers of its people into a future they don’t yet fully understand. Using technologies and methods still being invented. Making wholesale changes in this country’s priorities and public choices. Triggering prodigious shifts in where power resides and how it is deployed. Inviting minds of all persuasions and beliefs—carp, shark, Aquarian carp, dolphin—to think of themselves as Americans first, with common needs and interests and responsibilities. And, critically, shoving this whole protean enterprise in the right direction in a way that will not only make America whole again but prepare it for a new technological juggernaut now gathering force on the near horizon!

Such a tsunami of change has the potential to literally free humans worldwide of their enslavement to scarcity, hunger, poor health—and oligarchies of “elite deviants.” It is just the kind of gathering, massively reordering force that is America’s best hope for regaining its political, economic, cultural and even its spiritual footing.

You can help by calling our jeremiad to the attention of others and urging them to share links to it in their own blogs and emails. And using every means available, and especially your ties to social networks to issue your own clarion call.

Let the Wave of the Dolphin begin (with you and me)!

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My thanks to Dr. Paul Kordis, my collaborator on Strategy of the Dolphin: Scoring a Win in a Chaotic World and other works, for sharing his thoughts on many of the above topics.