Sitting here at two minutes to midnight, We The People need to have a serious discussion about our future as a nation. Or rather the lack thereof. We’ve long passed the point where the twin infections of civic apathy and partisan politics became a fatal pathogen to the American body politic. Evil flourishes when good people do nothing.
Democracy dies when most citizens opt out of the process.
As brash and as bandied as the Trump presidency has been so far, it’s not off the spine of our most infamous and infantile political partisans. A solid minority of the American electorate boasts a long history of courting insanity when their chips get down. Even a clownish and incapable Congress is par for the course if you’ve spent anytime at all studying US history.
What remains unique about this moment is wide-spread social media saturation and universal voting, however much the franchise remains under attack in states across America.
Generation Z continues to take action in a way their parents and older siblings never have and never will. Maybe Millennials will step up to the plate, but Gen X is clearly toast. Beaten down long before their time on stage even while today’s “kids” assault the barriers of inertia and dysfunction with all the energy, enthusiasm, and optimism reserved for youth.
External forces wage a second front that American Empire zealots can’t deny. The world is getting small and drastic climate change will make it even smaller. The only way humanity survives the coming challenges is as a motivated whole. We’ll probably maintain national identities for organizational purposes, but the needs of the many will finally outweigh the gluttony of the few.
It remains to be seen how quickly the United States can truly unite around a common purpose, but that journey begins with every citizen voting in every eligible single election. Anything less leads straight to extinction.