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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