Editor’s note: This commentary is by Jeffrey Reel, a writer/lecturer living in Lyndon Center, and general manager of Natural Provisions, in St. Johnsbury. He was previously sustainability manager at the Omega Center for Holistic Studies in Rhinebeck, New York.
[A]merica, karma is coming home to roost.
Did you think there would be no psychological, emotional, social, political and economic payback for our wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan and the slaughter of millions of innocents over the past 50+ years (an estimated 3.8 million civilian deaths in Vietnam; 800,000 in Cambodia; 1 million in Laos, 650,000 in Iraq, 100,000 in Afghanistan. And this represents death from direct violence. One needs to add millions of additional dead men, women and children due to loss of health care and lowered quality of life in subsequent years); propping up the shah of Iran, which resulted in his overthrow and the rise of today’s Revolutionary Guard; then providing Saddam Hussein money and military weapons (including chemical weapons) in order to check the power of that Revolutionary Guard; supporting Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos, which created the reaction seen in today’s cruel and sadistic leader Duterte; CIA covert operations undermining democratically elected governments in Latin and South America; helping to destabilize the region for decades and contributing to the migration of refugees toward the U.S. border, now placing infants and children in cages – yes, cages – without their parents, and even, we now learn, drugging them, abusing them, losing track of them by the thousands.
Did you really believe there would never be payback for our veneer of decency, and self-righteous and self-congratulatory behavior? Donald Trump has now given tens of millions of Americans permission to play out their darkest nature, turning it into acceptable social behavior. We are gnawing on the bones of our children.
We are no longer the country our Founding Fathers envisioned. Well, perhaps with the exception of Benjamin Franklin.
As the Constitutional Convention of 1787 was drawing to a close in Philadelphia, an ailing Benjamin Franklin was asked his opinion of the document and new form of government. He was too ill to speak so he had his remarks read on his behalf: “I agree to this Constitution with all its faults … because I think a general government necessary for us, and there is no form of government but what may be a blessing to the people if well administered; and I believe, further, that this is likely to be well administered for a course of years, and can only end in despotism, as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic government, being incapable of any other.”
Here Franklin envisions a government ruled, not by one person but by many – with a supposedly protective system of checks and balances. On paper, it would have the appearance of being a fail-safe system against despotic rule, and yet Franklin predicted that this is just what would happen. He got human nature right, but he probably could not envision what a despotic democracy would look like. The executive and legislative branches of our federal government are now unresponsive to the will of the general public. They’ve been purchased by the highest bidders. Donald Trump is its figurehead, and perhaps the culmination of government deconstruction.
The United States Constitution becomes less effective in protecting our rights over time. It is being reinterpreted to favor the powerful and the few. It is becoming anachronistic; an historical curiosity, as all political charters eventually become.
I appreciate that millions of Americans are decent, loving and generous people, but destructive forces require far less energy and time to destroy what constructive forces require decades to create. I am certain that millions of Russians also object to the dictatorship of Vladimir Putin, and millions of Filipinos object to the dictatorship of Rodrigo Duterte, just as millions of Italians objected to the rule of Benito Mussolini, and millions of Germans went quietly into the night during the rise of Adolf Hitler. I am sure they were all told to be “sensitive” to the supporters of the dictators, and to try to understand their grievances, and to tiptoe around them so as not to awaken, and anger, them.
But our silence, complacency and compliance – in short, our complicity — will be the death of us. We are now faced with the growing cataclysmic events of climate change: mass migrations have begun, nationalism is on the rise (survival of the fittest mentality), social structures challenged and breaking down; political systems moving to the extremes; economies threatened; rising seas, evaporating lakes and fossil aquifers running dry. In the United States, progress made in human rights, social and economic justice and the environment are being systematically reversed. All government institutions are being attacked, and dismantled, from within.
The United States is leaving a wonderful legacy for the world. The torch of democracy has been passed successfully to 122 other countries since the lighting of our own. We can be proud of our history, and our contributions, but we have squandered our inheritance, and we take our eroding freedoms for granted. Many American citizens no longer want to shoulder the burden of self-governance.
Democracy has often been described as a fragile experiment. Here on U.S. shores anyway, it seems to have shattered. God help us in the coming days, because we seem less willing than ever to help each other.
