Monica Harris Threw Away the American Dream
Monica's lower-middle-class parents sacrificed almost everything for Monica to get her education. She finished law school and worked as a corporate attorney, earning a big salary in Los Angeles.
Then Monica shut down her career and moved her family to rural Montana. Not exactly an ideal location for someone who is both Black and gay, right? Monica seemed unconcerned.
At this point in the book, part of me was expecting another story of a yuppie putting together a big bank account to buy a chunk of wilderness and then complaining the neighbors are all rednecks. My preconception of Monica’s situation was bubbling through my surface. Did I say “preconceptions”?
Monica did not find a tribe of rednecks. She found people who were different than her, but for the most part, they were people just trying to get by and get along. Monica has learned a lot about the United States. The real United States.
Yes, she did find prejudice in Montana. But she also found prejudice in Los Angeles, even in the corporate world. She says that she has been stopped only five times by Montana police in 10 years. This is not a sign of a police force dedicated to harassing Black drivers. She is not seeing the big divide that the mass media seems to be portraying as the real America. In her world, Americans are generally getting along reasonably well with each other — even though there is still more work to do.
This book is an easy and comfortable read. Monica seamlessly goes from insight to insight to insight. This is a very efficient book to get an unconventional perspective of America — and probably a more realistic perspective.
Her main quote is: “Stop pretending the USA is a democracy.” And she backs this position up with her many insights.
Monica asks us to recognize that poverty, not racism, is the root cause of the American Divide. And this poverty has been systemically created and covered up just to make rich people a little richer.
Monica is not kind to the wealthiest 0.1% of Americans. She lays a lot of blame on this class for where the USA is today.
And this is where I will quibble with Monica’s analysis. This 0.1% demographic has a bigger demographic as its helper: The American Aristocracy.
Monica was not born into this social class. But with her parents’ sacrifice, she was one of the few able to join it. Had she chosen to remain, she could have passed that privilege to her children.
Monica does not bring us to any solution. Rather she sees her book as our awakening. When enough of us have been woken up, that’s when we’ll have a revolution. She mentions that the upcoming revolution need not be violent. She believes that the revolution will find the thinkers that can take the USA to where it needs to go. Monica is one of the few thinkers to recognize that the current version of American democracy needs replacing, not fixing.
Read Monica’s book. A fast read with many well-defined perspectives. It will help many of us to articulate our current values a little better.
Tiered Democratic Governance (TDG)
As my few loyal readers know, I dovetail most of my Medium articles into my alternative democracy, the TDG. The TDG has no political parties, no noisy election campaigns, and voting is based on good character and capacity for governance.
The TDG will not be built by the political elite, the wealthy, the celebrities, or the academics. Nor the American Aristocracy. We average people need neither help nor permission from these groups. We just need to find about 10 hours a month — and work with a few of our neighbors. The building of the TDG will bring people of many different backgrounds learning how to work together. We so much need a project like the TDG to find our unity.
In 2009, I had put all the pieces of my alternative democracy together. In Chapter 6, I talk about how a western democratic society can peacefully move to a TDG. In other words, I have a plan for how to move from HERE to THERE. I hope Chapter 6 finds favor with Monica and her supporters. I doubt Monica has read anyone with a plan like Chapter 6.
If Monica’s intention is to waken us to the condition of the USA, she is in the top five writers that I have encountered in this genre. But I’ve been on Medium for three years now. I have read hundreds of articles about the symptoms of the disease that is facing the USA and other democracies. Most political readers and writers on Medium already know something is very wrong. How much more awakening is really necessary?
So, I ask all of this article’s readers: “When do we move from reading and talking and writing toward action?”
Published on Medium 2022
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