Things Can Always Be Worse

Actually, I can think of circumstances where things probably can’t get worse, at least for the participants.

It was on this day in 1804 that hostilities between Vice-President Aaron Burr and Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton boiled over into a duel. Burr shot Hamilton who lingered for a day before dying.

As I consider our current national political crisis with a gerrymandered House representing a minority and declining segment of American public opinion but for the time safely ensconced in power, now vigorously determined to block and if possible bring down a moderate progressive president. Worth noting if the upcoming elections go as it looks they might go they might even try to impeach him, it can seem hard to believe it can be worse.

As Winston Churchill is said to have said, “Democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others that have been tried.”

While Americans have no serious advocates for a totalitarian socialism, we are today under siege from those who would dismantle pretty much all forms of government, except perhaps a standing army, as well as various social constraints regarding race and gender. The particularly annoying thing about this for me is that the rhetoric behind this is “freedom,” where many, most of its adherents seem oblivious to the realities of human nature and power and that all they’re doing to the degree they succeed is create a power vacuum that will be filled by people who aren’t accountable in any way to the mass of people. Oh, and those who cynically use ordinary people fed endless misinformation about the actual condition of things as their cat’s paws…

Of course Churchill is also said to have said “you can always count on the Americans to do the right thing – after they’ve tried everything else.”

Maybe.

We might not be on a direct march to some corporate feudalism by way of dismantling an intervening government, however foolish and shortsighted and often corrupt one way or another it is, the worst excepting all the others, but I am worried…