The United States has drifted so far afield from it's design and conception - we have become a drunken juggernaut - yanked to and fro by foreign interests and entanglements, corporate kleptocrats, and the passions of the mobs. The American people seem no long united in anything in particular, but merely delineated by geographical and political boundaries.
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The average American likely believes the United States is a Democracy - how often have we seen angry mobs chanting "this is what Democracy looks like" engaged in violent assault and destruction. Yes that is what Democracy, looks like, which is why the leaders who formed the United States designed a Republic. This is not opinion or interpretation - a light reading of the Federalist Papers immediately reveal the intent and the context of thought in which our Country's Government was chartered.
The same mobs that proclaim that we are a Democracy meet open discussion with a closed fist, and the very corporate agents that subvert our leaders through their greed try to control every single digital forum where rational and unhampered discussion can occur. Our news agencies are quick to pat themselves on the back while leading the charge into ruination time after time, and lining their pockets by stoking fear and rage in the American people. On cable news smiling, polished beautiful ghouls recite the day's tragedies, while cartoonish advertisements for anti-depressants make for a peculiar Orwellian theater.
A Democracy, or a Republic that has forgotten its nature is manifestly more susceptible to manipulation. President George Washington spoke clearly of this at his farewell address - a few lines of which follow.
"All obstructions to the execution of the laws, all combinations and associations, under whatever plausible character, with the real design to direct, control, counteract, or awe the regular deliberation and action of the constituted authorities, are destructive of this fundamental principle, and of fatal tendency. They serve to organize faction, to give it an artificial and extraordinary force; to put, in the place of the delegated will of the nation the will of a party, often a small but artful and enterprising minority of the community; and, according to the alternate triumphs of different parties, to make the public administration the mirror of the ill-concerted and incongruous projects of faction, rather than the organ of consistent and wholesome plans digested by common counsels and modified by mutual interests.
However combinations or associations of the above description may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely, in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion."
We are most certainly a divided Nation - a morrass of conflicting ambitions, unreconciable differences, with each faction competing to seize the powerful engines of economic and millitary force to pursue their various self interest - and always to the cost and degradation of the American people.
After 20 years of military adventurism and and an elevation of diversity over commonality the American Military can no longer meet it's recruiting goals - an unfortunate state - as America's leaders appear committed to igniting World War on multiple fronts. For decades America's youth has been taught to hate their own country, it's seems remarkably incoherent those same youth would then be enthusiastically willing to risk life or limb in it's service.
College campuses and the intelligentsia have spent the past two decades - identifying angry young white males as an existential threat to the Country - though these past weeks have seen college campuses filled with those who espouse a desire for violence, waving banners and signs proclaiming an unrepentant romance for freedom fighters (so called) who rampaged through villages, shooting and murdering the elderly and the young alike. The angry young American white men were likely at home - not spending money they don't have, and numbing themselves with pornography video games and alcohol.
The experts and media will no doubt pretend the past two decades did not happen and spend the next year shaming and extorting young those same men to enlist for the defense of their betters.
There seems to be a maddening confluence of events as each faction works to saw and hack a bit faster at the branch we are all precariously perched on.
It is time for us to slow down and talk with each other about what our commonalities are again, to pause in bludgeoning each other with nihilistic academic theory and new speak, to have the challenging discussion and determine what serves us an American people, if we still exist.