After all the chaos subsides, after some court cases and sentences, possibly after some funerals and other relocations, life in these United States will not go back to ‘normal.’ Nor should it: “Normal” was so dysfunctional on so many levels, largely before this country refused to learn from the past or even remember its own history.
The silver lining here is our opportunity to make some major changes, to institute some real corrections and improvements. We have before our eyes the results of not covering some of ‘what could go wrong?’ The Founders had such higher-than-realistic notions of who could ever access power, of how venal and personally cowardly, of how honorless people could be elected to office… The time of the setting of the foundations of the United States were fully immersed in colonizer-thinking and assumptions about the roles and potentials of all members of society. We know so much better now! We have the knowledge and have to find the will to release those faulty traditions and beliefs and rebuild better even while we retain the best of what the Founders shaped–to mention just a few:
- Separation of Church and State
- Freedom of Speech
- Freedom of the Press
It’s that, or simply realizing we are done, the “American Experiment” is finished, destroyed by its fundamental conceptual flaws: All the best lost along with the worst. Nothing would make some people, some regimes in the rest of the world happier!
It’s interesting to imagine what would come next across this landscape that we’ve called the United States. I have some ideas, all of them better than any authoritarian regime.
LOOSELY SPEAKING... 