Tuesday, January 31, 2017

America Divided



America Divided

One has to wonder how the America we love got to be so politically divided.  Is this a passing phase, or is this disunity to be perpetuated by the blistering rhetoric and memes in the media, on line and in our other discourse?  The losing side in this election does not seem to able to phantom that they lost.  The country voted and rejected the ideologues in Washington.  The populist based winners are hell-bent to implement all that they promised during a bruising campaign, no matter how overtly ridiculous.  Neither side seems to give an inch, and uses all the modern technology they can to disparage the other side.  One side says “we won the popular vote”.  The other side says “we won the popular vote in 49 states, all but California”.  And the dialogue goes on.

A discouraging feature of this divide is the egregious disregard of the facts around the election and the transition to power.  The left, in all its forms, continues to pontificate anecdotally against the personality and peccadillos of the new president, rather than address substantive issues.  At this writing, this president has been in office all of two days, and all one sees in our vaunted media is rants against his personality and what he may do.  The right, on the other hand, present false information on trivial issues like crowd size, TV ratings, voter fraud and the like, also obfuscating real issues.  And we, consumers and purveyors of the news through our smartphones and social media, regularly post and spread false information about both sides by seeking out information, no matter how fake, to support our views.  We don’t help.  We contribute to the divisions.

Will it ever end?  Of course it will.  Trump will either be a popular hero by reviving the economy and bringing common business sense to government, or he will fail and be voted out.  That’s how our system works.

Is this the worse it’s ever been?  Not by a long shot.  It may be exacerbated by our technology and our smartphone and online activity, but the current disunity is nowhere near where we have been before.  We’ve had presidents shot down in our streets.  We’ve lost three quarters of a million men in our civil war.  We have had myriad upheavals threatening to destroy our republic.  Yet we have prevailed. 

Andrew Jackson, founder of the modern day Democrat party in the 1820’s was a crude, backwoods megalomaniac who ran roughshod over the Washington establishment and literally ran over our checks and balances.  He carried a bullet close to his heart from a prior duel, and was known to shoot opponents, rather than just debate them.   We got over Andrew Jackson.  (And put him on our twenty dollar bill.)

We had several serious populist movements that were quite rancorous in the 19th century.  And of course we had the granddaddy of all disagreements, our civil war.  Recent estimates now place total deaths during the civil war at 750,000, a grim reminder where political division can lead.  Even the effects of our civil war continue to mitigate with time.

More recently, in the mid twentieth century, we had a massive social upheaval fueled by the civil rights and anti-Viet Nam war movements. As a personal anecdote, I returned to New York City from the Middle East in mid-1967.  Harlem, two miles north of where I was staying, was burning.  Newark was burning.  Detroit was burning.  Parts of Los Angeles were burning.  I thought the country had gone mad.  But eventually we came out of it.

And we will come out of this one.  This is simply an election result and a particularly controversial and idiosyncratic president.  You don’t think America will prevail and emerge stronger?  I do.  Just take a look at our turbulent history.

Ray Gruszecki
January 25, 2017

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