In the mass media culture that modern America uses as a mirror, stories go viral most often when they fit a bigger narrative.<\/p>\n
Right now, we’re pretty unsure about ourselves and our future.\u00a0 Liberal bloggers have taken to talking about the new “Third World” America in which gilded age capitalists are blithely wrecking the middle class.<\/p>\n
And on the Right, the general sentiment is that the nation has slid into a kind of end-times slide, where our Judeo-Christian-European culture is being swamped by welfare-gobbling, disease-spreading, and vote-cheating\u00a0 illegal aliens.<\/p>\n
The whole mix is spiced with a lot of very real anxiety about the recession, about the rise of new global titans — China, India, Brazil — that are challenging Brand USA.<\/p>\n
(Did anyone notice that that most American of beers, Budweiser, was bought out by a Brazilian conglomerate?)<\/p>\n
Crawling into the center of this narrative is the nasty, icky bedbug.\u00a0 What better symbolizes the idea of our great nation losing its Generation Next ultra-modern momentum than a verminous invasion?<\/p>\n
Surely, this says something about us as a people?\u00a0 Surely this connects somehow with the idea that our roads are in disrepair, our data lines are outdated, and our public schools are giant slacker mills?<\/p>\n
Actually, of course, none of those things are true.\u00a0 Bed bug infestations are icky, but natural events — and it happens that Paris is suffering from this one just as fiercely as New York City.<\/p>\n
(And those new urban hotspots — Beijing and New Delhi — are hardly paragons of pest-free cleanliness.)<\/p>\n
In reality, America isn’t a third world nation.\u00a0 And we’re not being hijacked by brownskinnned peoples from south of the border.<\/p>\n
I’ve been driving around New York state and Vermont a lot lately:\u00a0 I find trim, well managed communities, connected by well-maintained roads.\u00a0 My cell phone works brilliantly in far more places than it did a couple of years ago.<\/p>\n
Stores are busy.\u00a0 School playgrounds are packed with healthy-looking kids.\u00a0 Many of the community leaders I talk to — in education, government, private business — are doing innovative, smart things to try to build a better future.<\/p>\n
Does that mean things are super-swell?\u00a0 No.\u00a0 We face huge challenges, from the big budget deficits at the state and Federal level to fundamental questions about the northern-NY economy.<\/p>\n
But sometimes it strikes me that our biggest hurdle may be the fact that so many Americans buy into the bed-bug narrative.\u00a0 They seem to think this is the new permanent reality, an unsolvable downturn.<\/p>\n
In a way, maybe the bed bug is a better metaphor for the tough things we have to do to solve those looming problems and put our collective house in order.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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