Most young adults have been through some kind of relationship loss. Be it breaking up with a loved one or loosing a family member. Each one grieves in a different way. Some find solitude in rationalization others in crying and still others in the bottle. One common thread that runs through everyone’s process of grieving is the proverbial “Rebound”.
The rebound helps one tackle with the loss of someone who played a significant part in his / her life. The person going through the rebound looks for someone (or something) to perform the role of that lost person. A rebound seldom works out to be a long term self sustaining relationship. People on a rebound try and make the new person fulfill the role of the person lost which often ends up in tragedy for all concerned.
For the longest time I believed that the “Rebound” is concept only seen in the realm of individuals. This was right up to the point when I came across the case of the America. I venture that the whole country is suffering from one big rebound.
This is a country that has been built on fighting against the bad guy. For the longest time this enemy was the USSR. The big bad “Communist” who represented everything that was not the “American Way”. Political leaderships sang about how “they”(the communist) were the cause of all evil and the urban middle class lapped it all up.
Hollywood got onto the band wagon, for this made the ideal plot for spy movies. “They” were the enemy and everyone had grown up knowing that “we” had to fight “them”.
Come the 1980s and 90s with the collapse of USSR and the fall the Berlin wall and there was no bad guy any longer. The communist were all but reduced to an insignificant force.
End Result – We have lost our bad guy!
Call it political gimmickry or just opportunism, but leadership after leadership in the post cold war era has been on a “Rebound”. George Bush (Sr.) told the American People it was Iraq. Clinton continued with it, and George H. W. Bush found him an Osama! The American People were looking for someone to hate and their leadership handed them the bad guy.
In the process though, the government had to create a sense of fear. For we need to “fear” the bad guys in order for them to be bad. 9/11 was the perfect catalyst to launch this campaign on fear. Which has been successfully done right through the current presidential regime.
Be it when America labeled the Taliban as Enemy Number One, or when they invaded Iraq and assassinated (yes assassinated) Sadam Husain. These were all “cow boyish” quests to find and kill the bad guy.
Unless America is able to get past this quest for an enemy there is little or no way in which it will be able to build lasting relationships within the global community. Hopefully good sense and maturity would prevail when the new president comes in.
Only time will tell if the next president is able to get over this Rebound and build lasting global relationships.
