Walking Toward an Expansive Ocean in Lieu of Watching Democracy Decline

A teenager in the 1970s I watched the Watergate morass daily.  Reading several papers each morning, the NY Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer and some other I also viewed the hearings live on TV.  In August of 1974 I watched Nixon resign.  Before the day was over, I was dancing in a thunderstorm as a live CSN&Y played Ohio for me and 50,000 of my peeps. Within a year I had taken courses in American Constitutional history at university.  My university studies would not be an end of my Constitutional studies, I took three more courses in law school and wrote my critical analysis paper, sort of my thesis for my JD degree, on the bullshit doctrine of original intent.  

Having experienced the turmoil of those years and having read on early challenges to our freedoms that were successfully resolved (sort of) I came away with the belief that American democracy could always heal itself.  Sometimes it would take a Senate panel, or a House committee, or a person with vision and determination about what democracy meant sitting in the Oval Office. Occasionally there was a landslide election called for. But we always found a path and a way to right the ship of state. We were always able to steer past demagogues and our baser interests.

 

But then came Reagan and his cult of selfish capitalism.  Morning for the angry American had come. Greed is good was a thing. Next up were the endless and pointless wars built on lies. Weapons of mass destruction my ass.  Lastly came the megalomaniacal rule of the last President and his cult of greed, racism, and narcissism. Trump exposed the ugliness that is barely hidden in America today.  Fears of the other (racism and xenophobia), selfishness and shortsightedness seem to be about all the US population can muster today when they think of their relationship to their fellow citizens and the government.

 

Nobody but nobody seems to be taking seriously the equality of both the obligations and the rights citizenship imposes on us and grants to us. Every conversation is about individual rights, none on communal duties.  I have the right to be free from wearing a mask.  I don’t have an obligation to avoid passing on a deadly disease to my fellow country people. I have a right to be free from vaccine mandates.  But I have no obligation to ensure the health care system does not collapse. I have a right to be free of government oversight.  But don’t stop the benefits that flow to me from social welfare programs.

 

On the surface the mindset kind of, sort of resembles Libertarianism. But the current zeitgeist of America is not Libertarianism.  The folks taking these stances want government to give to them and their enclaves, people with the same skin tone and generalized faith and social status, but not to different others.  They may in a knee jerk way say they would be okay with Social Security being eliminated and Medicare being gutted, but when you do the deeper dive, they still want those benefits for themselves-they have earned them. What they want is the disenfranchisement of some nebulous group of freeloading others.

 

As the Roman leaders knew in the later empire, panem et circenses would entrench power and limit the potential of revolt.  Between football, baseball, hockey, cable TV and streaming services, we have enough circuses. What the Romans did not have was an almost instantaneous media cycle (I refuse to say news because Fox, OAN and a number of the liberal streams are not news-they are manipulation for political power) that could keep the people divided by playing on racial, religious and economic differences. The divisions entrenched by these media sources and by nefarious algorithms on Facebook render any chance of unified action for the common good almost nil.

 

In this situation I am of the mind that our democracy is at its most fragile state since the civil war.  Well maybe the plotting of the American Liberty League in the early 1930s was close. I am not sure what I can do at this point to help sustain our democracy.  In years past I have knocked on doors for political candidates.  I have run for office and won.  I have been a delegate to political conventions.  But those things are meaningless now.  When Citizen United came down individual Americans pretty much lost all voice in choosing our governance, but it was a voice that had been waning for years.

 

I am moving from my mid-sixties to my late sixties and the expiry date on my milk carton is potentially fast approaching.  Over the years my wife and I have saved enough money to have a decent cash stream over the term of our retirement. Emotionally I can’t handle watching a nation, which for all its foibles, seemed focused on providing a better shot at the pursuit of happiness for all its people turn toward a civil war tied to greed, race and grievance. I don’t have the fight left in me for what is coming.

 

Me, I have always loved the North Atlantic.  Portugal is fronted by that great ocean on two sides.  There are still places along that ocean that I can afford.  The Portuguese government seems to be in a constant state of kerfuffle but it is still a democracy.  And the Portuguese are a warm people with civilized customs (think espresso and a pastry in a park), open to strangers (and their money).  I can’t stay here and watch the democratic traditions of over two hundred years crumble under a sea of misinformation moving an uneducated and uncaring population toward authoritarianism.  Give me a good beer, an ocean view, Apple music and a VPN to watch trashy Netflix movies and I will watch the coming crisis from afar. Life is too short.