American Creed

When the Great Depression occurred, people lost money from the businesses they created. It caused a worldwide economic crash from 1929 to about 1940. The same thing happened when the terrorist attacks of 9/11 occurred. The economy, as a whole, crashed. People who served the country were very mad and upset because they had fought for the country and yet they were too old and unable to go back into service. It pulled at the patriotic heart-strings of people all around the country.

Today it seems like people have lost faith in our community and in our whole society. Underclass communities and people are struggling with poverty. Terrence Davenport, who was raised in the economically struggling Arkansas Delta and attended the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, appeared on the PBS show “The Conversation with Jeff Weeks for WSRE.” Davenport said, “the wealthy need to create paths for the underclass that are struggling today.” I agree that the wealthy should make more jobs available to the less wealthy or just make more things accessible to the less wealthy. The official poverty rate is about 12.7 percent. In 2016, there were 43.1 million Americans living in poverty, and, according to supplemental poverty measure, the poverty rate was about 14.0 percent. Those numbers where recorded in 2016, could you imagine what the present is now? If more of the wealthy people in America chipped in, to help the communities living in poverty by donating money to helpful causes, our communities would begin to get better and gain their faith back that has been lost.

Davenport also said that, “we are really good at turning a blind-eye for important issues. We have to pay attention to the details that really matter.” This is a strong statement because if people realized that we are losing faith to serve and fight for the issues we have today, maybe we could find solutions to these problems as a community, as a whole. David M. Kennedy, the Professor of History Emeritus at Stanford University and a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, appeared in the PBS documentary film American Creed, where he says that people are losing faith in our society, “societies that get infected with bad images of themselves, are sad societies. People have lost the feeling of citizenship. We have lost faith in society and all kinds of institutions especially in the leadership institutions; the government, church, Boy Scouts, professional athletics, the media. Name an institution, today we think less well of it than our parents did.” The more we ignore the issues we are facing, the more people are going to turn away and lose faith in their communities. Tegan Griffith, a senior at the University of Wisconsin and a Veteran, says that people who are struggling don’t have a lot of money for themselves or their families, that is where being a part of the military really helps because it’s has allowed her to put food on the table for her family and she is still able to serve for the country, and other people.

We as a country and as a community need to step up and start fighting for what is right again. It is important that we come together and fight for the issues we are facing today in life. We need to value our issues and come together and find solutions for them. We need to continue fighting to make our communities stronger than ever. We need to get faith back into our society and continue bringing more communities together as one.