Resilience is an important part of life, being able to handle failures, and setbacks, and deal with whatever trials that life throws at you. Being able to have as they call it ‘thick skin’ is an important part of life. It isn’t, however, about toughing out all the bad things and never preventing them. Resilience is about adapting to your circumstances and rising to meet them. It’s not just withstanding a storm, it’s soaring with the wings of an eagle to rise above it.
This is what the American dream was built around, a land of freedom where if you work hard, strive creatively, and be consistent, you can build a better world for yourself and your family. While often hanging on life support in practice, that has never ceased to be a powerful ideal. As Superman put it in an episode in 1942, “Truth, Justice, and the American Way”, this has been a continual goal throughout all of the USA’s lifespan.
Here’s where the issue, ideals are great, but they need to be put into practice. Americans have had, as many would gladly point out, an issue with being resilient. In a way, this has caused a bit of a divide in generations. A lot of older generations accuse younger generations of being too sensitive and getting easily triggered, which isn’t without its merit. But this isn’t a generational issue, it’s a generational flavor to it.
Lacking resilience can also take the form of having a hard time associating with people who aren’t like you, whether that be race, religion, or political ideals. If you have a hard time dealing with people who don’t believe the same things as you, or even more so, hate your political opposition as a whole (individuals may vary, some people are just jerks, but very very seldom is the majority of a group. Very few people are actually nazis.) then you probably have a resilience problem. This isn’t a generational problem, it’s a human problem.
This problem has gotten worse in many regards. While blatant slavery and racism were a plague on America for a very long time (and to a lesser extent still now), the divide between Americans, regardless of ethnicity is at an extreme high. The amount of hate between the divide of left and rate has gotten to the point where it’s a battle between who can win rather than who can make America better. This is why resilience is such an important part of a person’s virtues. Without it we build a government on a foundation of shifting sand. That’s what causes issues in governments; it is a divide that grows. And if a war or disaster breaks out, the only real choices left are to pull together or to be torn apart.
In many instances of disaster in the past, Americans have joined together to help mitigate an issue or rebuild after a disaster. Take the 9/11 terrorist attacks. “…79% of adults said they had displayed an American flag. A year later, a 62% majority said they had often felt patriotic as a result of the 9/11 attacks.” Over half the country said that they felt patriotic. Their country pulled together to overcome a great tragedy. Compare that to 23 years later, over two decades of time to undo it. “According to a 2023 survey, roughly 39 percent of respondents stated they were extremely proud to be an American.”
I believe this is because our resilience as Americans has plummeted over time. Perhaps not in our treatment of minorities and different genders, but in our resilience in being able to work with everyone else to make the world better. Instead, it’s an us vs them mentality, and it’s killing our nation, a slow rot, but an inevitable one.
Inevitable almost, see there’s a solution here. Not a fairytale one, not an easy one, but one that’ll work all the same. Teach both yourself and your children to be resilient. Choose to move past differences and work towards a common goal. Even if its just in your own family or community. That’s where the line in the sand is drawn, that’s where our choices about unity are made, not in elections or grand gestures, but in our daily lives with our fellow Americans.
