Conflictual or Consensual Culture In America?

           Conflictual or Consensual

        In America we used to be a consensual country, but now as time moves on America is slowly growing apart. As problems develop America starts to divide. The 2000 election is just one of the examples. It divided the states to become Red States and Blue States. The Reds states being the traditional Midwestern folks and the Blues being the modern Coastal folks. In reality the Red states represent Republican, and the blue states represent Democratic. These issues show how divided our country is by political parties. A consensual country like Sweden and Japan do not have their country divided by a Red side or a Blue side, leaving them to have one big side.

       The Red States and the Blue states are not the only reason that America has become a conflicted country, other small problems like gun control and religion have helped divide our country as well. In consensual countries citizens don't typically question their government, they trust it. While in America, we are constantly questioning the decisions our government makes and debating whether they made the right choice. Small problems like this are helping our country become more and more divided. The problems helped divide our government into liberals and conservatives. Liberals being the people who want more involvement with the government, and conservatives being the people who want less. All in all these problems and groups just help with our countries division.

As I said in the beginning of my paragraph America wasn't always a divided country. Like Kelsey Guinipero said in her blog post America is considered to be "The Great American Melting Pot" which represents the great diversity America has brought together, but as time passed America's diversity has began to change into the Blue states and the Red States, the conservatives and the liberals, and other groups of conflict. While watching the videos one part that stood out to me was what Trump said during an interview "We have lost the American Dream." This stood out to me because our President believes our country became too divided to keep the American dream of  having prosperity, success, and upward sociality mobility for children and families all through hard work from a society with a few barriers. The division of our country through the problems America faces have destroyed one of the main focuses in America, the American Dream by creating multiple barriers. Our conflictual country is hurting us more than we realized it is because it is destroying our goals and happiness. By becoming divided it's making the governments job much harder to do. The purpose of our government is to make people happy, but with the confliction for each problem our country has, some people aren't going to be happy. Our country has become too divided and conflictual to focus on some of the best things for our country the American Dream being one of them and happiness.

Discussion questions: 

- Do you think the American Dream can be restored?

- Can we become a consensual government again?

- Is there a way to make everyone happy?