Exactly 75 years ago today, I was still in utero. So I could not hear the mantra that America was the greatest nation on Earth.
Prior to my debut, World War II bombs had blasted Europe to smithereens. Russia would not recover from 26.6 million dead for another 40 years. A defeated Japan needed U.S. protection. China had yet to enter the 20th Century.
And so on and so forth around the world.
So, yes, America was unquestionably the greatest country on Earth. By default. Everyone else was a mess.
The 1950s were good to America. We were still without a doubt the greatest nation on the planet — materially speaking. Nikita Khrushchev actually thought that the modern America that he saw on his U.S. visit was really a fake Potemkin village as he strolled through that kitchen with a gloating vice president, Richard Nixon.
We Baby Boomers heard the “We Are The Greatest” chant often. Horse hockey. It was more propaganda than a slogan. It was a cover-up to make us feel good about ourselves. Nothing more, nothing less.
Deep down, most of us know better. That’s why MAGA — Make America Great Again — was the perfect subliminal slogan to rally America from our perceived slide down to the rest of the godawful human race.
I’ll get to Tyre Nichols soon enough because my column is really about the national mindset that produced his nauseating death.
Cutting through the haze and seeing the truth is next to impossible for those calcified Americans who go through their lives with hardened viewpoints.
I learned this during my college years when the Vietnam War was raging. “Love it or leave it’ really meant “Go ahead and leave the greatest country on Earth. Scram. We don’t need you.”
Tyre Nichols. It was obvious to me as a cub reporter in 1971 that the South Bend Police Department consisted of the good, the bad and the ugly. I avoided the latter two.
I gravitated to the “good” to be my sources as I filed Tribune stories of murder, larceny, rape and pillage. But imagine for a second a South Bend’s police force — or any police force — composed entirely of the good? Why not?
Why should cities and town across America not have police departments consisting of the best men and women who have the guts and determination to wear the blue?
What keeps us from establishing much tougher protocols requiring police candidates to undergo a battery of thorough psychological evaluations in order to separate the wheat from the chaff?
I think it’s arrogance.
We don’t need decent police officers. We are so superior that we just need to blindly support the ones we have.
We have been brainwashed since birth to believe that America is the greatest country on earth.
Deeply believing that we are the pinnacle of the human race blinds us to our faults.
As long as Americans stubbornly hold onto this debilitating lie then there will be no national will to produce change.