America’s folly
In too many parts of the world, people are dying from hunger, disease, war, oppressive regimes, ignorance, and exposure to the elements. Young girls are being gang-raped, kidnapped, sold to prostitution, or exploited for cybersex. Citizens cannot express themselves without running the risk of being jailed, or put to death. Leaders come to power and stay there without popular consent.
In America, almost none of the above happens. Americans never had it so good. Having almost everything they want comes with being the world's greatest country, the world's only acknowledged superpower. Given everything they can imaginable enjoy, and pretty much what the rest of the world can only give their arms for, it truly is a wonder why Americans still cannot appreciate what they have been so blessedly given.
Maybe it is the price one has to pay for having so much — that one never gets satisfied with what one already has. Either that, or the Americans just don't get it. Prior to the elections in November, Americans had virtually a whole year to do what needed to be done to ensure their electoral process worked according to how it was supposed to. This was, after all, America in action. Even the whole world watched and awaited the outcome of the long drawn out process with bated breath.
Americans are so proud of their elections they even send observers to the elections of other countries to make sure these countries conform to at least some of the American model's most basic precepts of a free, clean and honest exercise that is meant to effect a peaceful transition of power. And yet, when everything was said and done and the vote was in, America, the great promoter of free choice, was appalled when the choice was made.
Never mind that it was the result of the greatest exercise of free choice in the world. Americans just lost their bearings and became unable to deal with the reality of a Trump presidency. So disconcerted have they become they are now trying to undermine the very things that made their country so great, and their own selves so uniquely privileged.
On the day Donald Trump was inaugurated as the 45th president of the United States, Americans who could not accept the result of their own democratic way of changing leadership took to the streets in many cities, setting fires and destroying property. They do not realize that it is not Trump they are really attacking but America itself.
Trump did not impose himself on America. He submitted himself to a process. So did all Americans, including those now whining. And it isn't even a new process. It is a process that has been exercised and respected by Americans for more than two hundred years, the same one they go to great lengths trying to impose on the rest of the world. To abide by the process only when the result is acceptable and reject it when the result is something else smacks is pure, unbridled hypocrisy.
I hope Americans will not rue the day when, because of their hypocrisy and folly, the protests escalate, turn more violent, and become a real crisis. And the global problems they used to see only on television start unfolding before their very own eyes at home. Then they will get to experience first-hand what it is like for whole communities to explode in flames and engulf entire families. Then they will know what it means to have so much and to squander it all away.
‘Trump did not impose himself on America. He submitted himself to a process. So did all Americans, including those now whining.’