For years I’ve repeatedly warned that America — as a democracy — its ideals and values — were not ordained forever by some god. And could not long endure if its people lost their sense of those ideals and values. They’d stop deserving such a country.
And so it has come to pass. My warnings tragically prophetic. Think this hyperbole?
Ignorant fools don’t realize it yet. So very much they don’t know. Wrapping themselves in the flag, blind to its meaning. The very cause of this tragedy.
How often, over the past nine years, has it been said, “This is not who we are.” Well, it is now.
True, only half of us. But an ounce of poison can fell an ox. And I’ve written about the power imbalance between good and evil — the good restrained by scruples, the bad unconstrained. And so the good sense of half our people has been defeated; the other half now reigns. The apotheosis of unreason and wickedness.
Being steeped in history makes this tragedy all the more crushing to me. Not just our loss, but the whole world’s. Ours was a unique country in the annals of humankind. The American dream not just about material well-being, but again those ideals and values. A self-governing people of mutual respect, where everyone’s human dignity is venerated, and all can thrive. Furthermore, a model for the world; a beacon light leading all humanity toward that dream, and shouldering responsible global leadership to bring it forward.
That was a country I was proud to call my own. A country I loved. Now it is gone and I am bereft.
Yet I also know there’s no such thing as an historical end-point.
The great blessing of our species is reason. It’s our use of reason that brought us out of the caves and into all the glories of civilization. Giving us not only material plenty, machines, electricity, airplanes, computers, but also, for ever more people, the ability to have lives well lived. But it’s always been a struggle.
Because the brain power enabling all that isn’t a human universal. Those advancements came about only thanks to a very few people at the far edge of the intelligence spectrum. If anything, held back by the rest. And what’s happened to America now is indeed a triumph of unreason.
And so the question: can there be a resurrection?
After all, many have been saying, America survived one Trump term. Well, sort of. Yet it did already inflict grave harm to the country’s essence. Who could ever have imagined an American president attempting a coup to retain power after losing an election? And then being elected again.
There, that says it all.
So now how can we imagine restoration of that lost national soul? This would seem fatal.
And yet . . . do not those great ideals still have power? Might Americans somehow rediscover them? We began, indeed, with a revolution, when its ideals were new in the world. We wouldn’t have to reinvent that wheel.
But that would take a citizenry quite different from today’s. And it’s hard to see such a transformation of mentality when all the cultural influences actually militate the other way. Filling people’s brains not with true knowledge and understanding, not with aspirational principles, but with the intellectual equivalent of junk food. Which is what brought us to the present moment.
Perhaps, somehow, someday, a better sort of human being will nevertheless emerge from this swamp. It won’t happen in my lifetime. For me, it’s over.
