I’ve spent most of my life thinking about disasters and potential apocalypses and injustice and misery: I’m a journalist, or at least I was, so I don’t get discouraged easily. So far the world, or at least our country, has always seemed to right itself in the nick of time. I seriously wonder if we can still do it though. We all know why:
A bitterly divided country
Racism
Institutional injustice
The terrifying assault on women’s rights and well-being, here and elsewhere
The decline of our public schools
Climate change
The rise of fundamentalism
The coarsening of our culture
The cost of a college education
Ebola
ISIS
Hunger
Anti-Vaxx-ers (seriously)
Add your own here____________________
Beneath those individual issues lies the biggest threat: what appears to be the larger change in our values. As I watched The Roosevelts and, strangely enough, re-watched The King’s Speech, I wondered (not for the first time) where those sorts of world leaders (FDR, a president with political skills, toughness, vision and an understanding both of where the country was and where he needed to take it, Teddy Roosevelt who took on income inequality through trust busting and began what became the environmental movement (and yes he also started a couple of wars… or a reluctant King George IV, who not only held Britain together and committed under horrible circumstances but also led by example) are today, whether they could be elected or heeded — whether they would even be willing to try. Even more, I wondered if our country would accept them; whether we are still capable of selflessness or a sense of duty or a thoughtful response to a call to sacrifice. I hope so.
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Cynthia Samuels
Cynthia Samuels is a long-time blogger, writer, producer and Managing Editor. She has an extensive background online, on television and in print, with particular experience developing content for women, parents and families.
For the past nine years, that experience has been largely with bloggers, twitter and other social media, most recently at Care2's Causes Channels, which serve 20 million members (13 million when she joined) and cover 16 subject areas. In her three years at Care2 monthly page views grew tenfold, from 450,000 to 4 million.
She has been part a member of BlogHer since 2006 years and has spoken at several BlogHer conferences. Among her many other speaking appearances is Politics Online, Fem 2.0 Conference and several other Internet gatherings.
She’s also run blogger outreach for clients ranging from EchoDitto to To the Contrary. Earlier, she spent nearly four years with iVillage, the leading Internet site for women; her assignments included the design and supervision of the hugely popular Education Central, a sub-site of Parent Soup that was a soup-to-nuts parent toolkit on K-12 education, designed to support parents as advocates and supporters of their school-age kids. She also served as the iVillage partner for America Links Up, a major corporate Internet safety initiative for parents, ran Click! – the computer channel - and had a long stint as iVillage's Washington editor. In addition, she has developed parent content for Jim Henson Interactive and served as Children’s Book Editor for both Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble.com.
Before moving online, she had a long and distinguished career as a broadcast journalist, as senior national editor of National Public Radio, political and planning producer of NBC's Today Show (whose audience is 75% women) where she worked for nine years (and was also the primary producer on issues relating to child care, education, learning disabilities and child development), and as the first executive producer of Channel One, a daily news broadcast seen in 12,000 U.S. high schools. She has published a children’s book: It’s A Free Country, a Young Person’s Guide to Politics and Elections (Atheneum, 1988) and numerous children’s book reviews in the New York Times Book Review and Washington Post Book World.
A creator of online content since 1994, Samuels is a partner at The Cobblestone Team, LLC, is married to a doctor and recent law school graduate and has two grown sons who make video games, two amazing daughters-in-law and three adorable grandsons.
View all posts by Cynthia Samuels
I’ve spent most of my life thinking about disasters and potential apocalypses and injustice and misery: I’m a journalist, or at least I was, so I don’t get discouraged easily. So far the world, or at least our country, has always seemed to right itself in the nick of time. I seriously wonder if we can still do it though. We all know why:
I think a lot of this is retrospect. If you had lived at this age during those times, I think you would have seen the leadership and state of the country in a very different way. And I think the way movies portray the strength of the leader and the love the citizens have for that leader a bit of a fantasy. Every time period has its own struggle, sometimes with the same issues, and views other time periods with a rose-coloured lens.
Maybe, and that’s a comforting thought. Movies are different, I think?, from documentaries like the Ken Burns films, which are so well-regarded.
Much has been written about the extraordinary confluence of FDR, Churchill and (gasp!) Stalin and of the commitment of the Greatest Generation. There just seems to be so much selfishness now, and self-occupation.
My parents were Greatest Generation so I knew them and their friends and their sense of duty and responsibility. Of course a lot of that emerged because FDR had had such an impact on not only the Depression but also on the formative years of their lives. My mom was born in 1918; Roosevelt took office in 1933 and was president until he died in 1945 so for my mother he was president from when she was 15 until she was 27! That’s huge – her entire adult life to that point! So his impact was gigantic: his leadership, that inspired Americans to survive the last years of the Depression and almost all of WWII with determination and, dare I say it, patriotism.
I just don’t see it in my generation or most of those who followed except for military people. They are a class though, following the generation before into service, and they are isolated from the rest of us. We don’t see their view of the world and they don’t see ours. I just don’t see even the America I knew as a kid. And I know all the flaws of my era, but I still worry about the tone of our country today.
For my children (and any future grand-children) I hope for the best. But, the disconnect and the abject meanness and greed exhibited by so many today is so disheartening. I was watching my state’s candidates for governor debate last night and I kept saying, “I don’t like (or trust) either of these guys.”