[Part of a series, this essay continues our exploration of Healing America’s Narratives: The Feminine, the Masculine, & Our Collective National Shadow. Now available.]

The previous posts in this series provide evidence that the problems and mood of the United States of America in the third decade of the twenty-first century are not surprising and are inevitable when history and current events are viewed through a trans-partisan, developmental lens.

A significant number of elected officials, including those I vote for and those I would never vote for, and a significant number of paid performance news commenters either do not know this (ignorance), do know it but avoid telling the truth due either to partisan agendas (arrogance) or to their concerns with not being re-elected or losing their jobs and careers (fear). Ignorance, arrogance, and fear are not mutually exclusive.

Instead, both groups play whack-a-mole.

They never seem to consider the hidden network of mole passages that are below the surface and that allow the moles to appear, avoid the whack, and reappear later through a different hole. The moles escape and reappear through a new hole because the whackers’ views tend to be so far from whole.

Each day, faced with the enormities of the consequences of the violence, depression, suicide, inequality, intolerance, ambivalence about the planet, lack of health and caring, greed, and excess that inform American history and current society, they try to whack a mole a day — or talk about whacking a particular mole. Again, they do not, cannot, or refuse to recognize the existence of the vast underground mole network that makes their whacking so frustrating or the interrelatedness of the various moles (or the same mole) that pop(s) up at different times and places.

Mole-whacking provides the appearance of busy-ness and hard work while very few, if any, moles actually get whacked. More importantly, whacking any particular mole will never get to the foundational, historical elements of the collective American Shadow (ignorance, arrogance, fear, bigotry, violence, greed, excess, bullying, untrustworthiness) that helped build the mole network and that keep it hidden.

These mole-whacking elected officials and paid performance news commenters will continue to whack moles as long as American citizens are willing to encourage, tolerate, or ignore this idiocy. What about you? Are you encouraging, tolerating, or ignoring this mole cruelty?

And yes, there are some elected officials and paid performance news commenters who try to point to the history of mole whacking and the mole network and keep their own whacking activities to a minimum.

Were Sisyphus real, he would probably admire them.