I’ll confess that today’s entry is probably one of the harder ones I’ve had to write of late.
The easy part is being thankful for the sacrifices and service of our citizens who took an oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic, so help them God…even without the constant reminder sitting on top of the entertainment centre!
And make no mistake, I am very thankful for the privilege of being able to freely cast a ballot to have a small say in who the people who will be tasked with governing our country.
But after several months of unrelenting negative attack ads, misleading statements if not outright lies from politicians and those who finance them, and an underlying concern with many candidates participating in an electoral process they clearly do not believe to be free and fair (except for their own election, of course!) who I suspect could be suborned into subverting the will of the people in future elections, I couldn’t help but have this one question running through my mind all week:
Would my father recognise the country and the people that he swore that oath to preserve, protect, and defend?
Sometimes I wonder.
That’s the thing about our form of government…it can be incredibly chaotic and divided in the short term but has proven to be remarkably stable in the long run. Indeed, no representative democracy envisioned like the one envisioned by and enshrined in our Constitution has ever lasted as long as ours. That the Constitution has only been amended 28 times since it was written in 1787 shows how prescient the Founding Fathers were in forming a system of government.
But there’s no mistaking that there are scary signs and portents that we just can’t ignore.
The political divisions we see now are as stark and hyper-polarised as we’ve ever seen and there are entities with lots of money who are inflaming the political divisions and encouraging tribal behaviour that distrusts anyone who isn’t in the tribe as some sort of traitor to the country. Silos of media acting as echo chambers and the hyper-partisan gerrymandering that seems to be the norm rather than the exception are only making things worse.
We’ve seen this before and it didn’t end well.
We called it the Civil War.
And if we’re not vigilant, we may well have another one on our hands.
I have faith that those citizens who have taken the oath to protect our Constitution will not stand idly by and allow our country to descend into a dictatorship like we’ve seen so many other countries do through the ages. It’s certainly a much harder proposition when the enemies to our democracy are of the home-grown domestic variety but I firmly believe that our men and women in uniform will do the right thing as they have ever since the founding of our country.
We will always have our political divisions and sometimes they will be signficant ones. We survived the bitter political divisions engendered by the Vietnam War as well as the distrust in government and institutions instigated by the Watergate scandal and all of the political scandals that have followed that have had “gate” appended to them.
What will save us as a country and a democracy is the understanding that our Constitution and the government it represents is worth preserving even with the occasional scandal and inefficiency because for all its faults, it’s still the freest form of government and society in this world.
So many men and women have served and sacrificed to defend the freedoms we take for granted and knowing that we have citizens still willing to do so is what helps me sleep better at night.
So here’s to those who defend democracy…we are more thankful for your service than you may ever know.