Have we lost our faith?
I don’t mean our individual spiritual faith, which may bond us to those of like ilk; but the faith that bonds us all, which is our faith in the Constitution of The United States of America. In the above, I see dire predictions. Wise people have told me, on the subject of worry, “What is the worst that can happen? Write that down. What is the best that can happen? Write that down, too. Now you can see, in writing, the two things that are least likely to happen. Now try to figure a course through this.”
For the worst that can happen, see above. For the best, I think you can imagine it yourselves.
I thoroughly agree with the insidious socialist inculcation of America, which began decades ago and has progressed to a potential tipping point. However, all we lack is an experience with it to break us of our infatuation.
Perhaps earlier rather than later would be best. Perhaps a good dose of President Obama and a Democratically-controlled congress would show some folks a thing or two.
In the meantime, the most robust human document in history will weather the storm, as it has for over 225 years. We’ve had disastrous presidencies before, and we will again.
We are not foolproof, and the Constitution was built to take that into consideration.
As a survivor of the Cold War (I have the certificate signed by Bill Clinton… woohoo…,) I know that we have been closer to annihilation than we are now. We are a nation populated by self-centered, selfish, short-memoried people who devour popcorn media with relish; because it is easy.
While those are the mass, there are still plenty of thinkers. Nothing proves a principle, theory, or conviction moot more effectively than a empirical experience.
Would we rather take our hard lesson now or later? We will have to take it sometime, certainly. The growing romanticism of socialism, fueled by our institutions of higher learning staffed, as they are, by those who have never turned a wrench or sat in an office endlessly, will need to be sated.
In the end, the Constitution will stand. Our children will live in a different world, but they will live under that Constitution. The America I live fairly happily in is much like the America that my father dreaded and warned me of. The cornerstone, the Constitution, will not be destroyed by one president, no matter how inept, foolish, idealistically misguided, or fiendishly clever.
If we are secure in this knowledge, our verbal assaults on each other will be less likely to be crass. We will find ways to maintain our senses of humor, and those who speak too stridently or chauvinistically will find themselves ignored. Our security in the belief that the Constitution will survive will significantly reduce our interest in even acknowledging such outbursts, the same way that we do not feel compelled to refute the paranoid schizophrenic who shrieks madness in the street.
Remember that our robust Union is so durable that not even a Civil War, a war so devastating as to have cost more American lives than all other wars combined, was not enough to destroy it.
Our Constitution was designed to not give one man that much power; let us not do it in our own minds. That in itself will take a lot of the steam out of our exchanges.
