Competing Against Perfection

Just curious. Why is the USA the only country that has to compete against perfection? This society is constantly criticized for not being fair enough or equal enough or not doing enough for one group or another. It seems the standard is that we must achieve some egalitarian perfection or our society is a failure. We created the standards that others, internally and externally, judge us by…while they fail to even come close to the level we have achieved.

This is the birthplace of modern representative government and free speech. There area lot of negative marks on our ledger, to be sure. However, even though it frequently takes longer than we’d like, we tackle issues and attempt to improve the level of freedom for all our citizens. This is a country where free men and women went to war to end slavery. We have improved the freedoms of women, minorities and people of various religious and sexual identities. Is it all perfect? Nope. Never will be. Life is messy and it always will be. We should stop making perfection our adversary and simply try to keep improving, individually and collectively.

We must be free to have the debates and the disagreements. Reaching a point where we all agree about everything may just be the most dangerous destination of all. We will always need the contrarian mind. We will always need the mind that sees old things in new ways. We need more minds that see the pointlessness of our endless tribal squabbles. We need more people who aren’t constantly looking to feel shortchanged and offended. Mostly, we need honest, caring leaders who do not knowingly, manipulatively fan the flames of faux division, in order to serve their own greedy agenda.

We need a healthy dose of respect. We need to understand that we live in the freest society on the planet. We need everyone to get busy just trying to be better…not perfect.