Solidarity or disintegration?

It’s not easy to see where the United States of America can go from here.

They’ve achieved, in full view of the whole world, a state of almost total anarchy. Untrustworthy leadership, internal dissention that shows no sign of healing, and a political system all but incapable of carrying out its day-to-day functions.

It’s probably too easy, just to place all the blame on Donald Trump’s woeful lack of qualifications, even for one of the simplest of minor office jobs in some obscure department. Yes, that was too easy; much too easy! There must be more to it than that, surely?

If unhappy Americans try to ease their pain through chronic drug-use, by sexually assaulting children, by mowing down fellow-citizens with assault rifles, or merely by using insults in place of civil conversation, we must ask what makes them so unhappy. I wonder if the entrenched and normalized economic disparity could be a factor, or the long-simmered resentment over racial integration of schools, or even the steady diet of mind-numbing violence offered by the entertainment industry? I could go on, listing more glaring deficiencies that have become accepted as part of the cost of living in the U.S.A., but where would the list end?

A health-care system that bankrupts citizens unfortunate enough to suffer a grievous illness, or to sustain a disabling accident; an education system that prefers not to teach the rudiments of democratic government; a social class-system more divisive than anything the British would have tolerated in their colonial heyday; a religious establishment that refuses to condemn social injustices or to protect the poor from exploitation; a scientific community that all too often follows political policy rather than rigorous scientific method. Any one of these examples, taken singly, would be an anomaly, but taken together they indicate systemic dysfunction.

It seems to me that we may be making a mistake when we point to the U.S.A. as a suitable pattern for fledgling democracies around the world to follow. Maybe we should rather hold the U.S.A. up as an object lesson illustrating the depths to which a once proud nation can sink.

Or, more simply, calling the U.S.A. what it is fast becoming — a failed state. Or even, as the president himself would say a “S***... hole country.”

I fear it may be far too late to make America great again.

Ed Healy Marystown