ELECTION 2024: The Demand for America's Maturity

Counterbalancing our collective immaturity in order to save our democracy

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In 2018, The New York Times and Miles Taylor thought they would do America a favor. Taylor decided to write an op-ed that he thought would bring some comfort to the country and the NYT decided to publish it. I guess they both realized that the country was on edge because a rather unfit individual held the highest office in the land. Perhaps they thought it was important to let the country know that “adults were in the room” and that they would not let our country careen off the rails. To his credit, Taylor did acknowledge that his attempt may be received as “cold comfort.” I guess at the time he figured cold comfort was better than no comfort at all.

In any case, even if his opinion piece offered some degree of comfort at the time, it proved to be an exercise in futility as their maturity turned out to be no match for the calamitous immaturity that continued to ensue. Because we all lived through it, it is very easy for us to point out that calamitous immaturity. What we seem to be blind to, however, is the collective immaturity that brought us 45th presidential administration to begin with, how that collective immaturity still persists today and that collective immaturity may very well “sleepwalk us into dictatorship,” as former Congresswoman, Liz Cheney, warns.

What do I mean by collective immaturity? What I mean is our media, our elected officials, and even our electorate have not stepped into the maturity that ALL of our elections call for. And because we have yet to do so, we sit less than 10 months away from arguably the most pivotal election in our nation’s history, wondering if our democracy is on its last legs. Worse yet, we wonder if our collective immaturity is so pervasive that we have become incapable of rescuing ourselves.

While Dr. King was referring to the Vietnam War, his words are very relevant now and the impetus for this post. I, for one, do not believe we are incapable of maturing. I believer our Creator has endowed us with the ability to solve problems of our own making. Though our collective immaturity may have incapacitated us to a certain degree, I don’t believe any of it to be irreversible or immutable. We can rescue our democracy and bring it back into proper balance if our media, our elected (and appointed) officials, and our electorate step into the maturity this moment in history demands. And that maturity demands we do the opposite of what we’ve been doing. So what are the immature ways of our media, elected officials and our electorate? Let me break each one down for you.