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Thinking of my five grandchildren -- four teens and one toddler -- makes me worry about where their country will be after the general election of 2016.
My concern is about the kind of life my grandchildren will have. The older four have already learned in civics class that the America in which they were born is a democracy. I suspect that they have been taught that democracy is the rule of the majority.
I was taught that, too, and my youngest grandchild eventually may be told that in her school. By that time, it may clear that such is not the case.
In fact, America is not a democracy. It is turning into an economic oligarchy based on a brash capitalistic venture in which the accumulation of vast wealth is protected by bought-and-paid-for elections. Why would everyone in the lineup seeking the Republican nomination for President have a tax plan that, when scrutinized even by us non-economists, reveals sure and certain signs of tax cuts for the wealthy at the unmistakable disadvantage of the poor and middle class.
It took the election of the nation's first African-American president to awaken the Fafner that has become the Tea Party. It's all about anger. It's all about the government being the enemy of the people. Since Obama is a Democrat, we should all vote Republican to put him in his place.
So tens of thousands of the angry voted Republican in 2010, sending a very strange lot to the House of Representatives and, in 2014, to the Senate -- the pi�ce de r�sistance of which was the woman hog castrator from Iowa. Things have been getting worse ever since. Suddenly the program is to do away with Social Security and Medicare. "Medicaid" is a bad word. Food stamps are the spawn of socialism. Taxes are grand larceny. The poor and struggling? Give us liberty and give them . . . well, what?
The nation's electrical grid, its highways and bridges, its railroads, its basic infrastructure are being left to deteriorate, because, heaven forefend, the government should spend any money. All that is a lesson in how to reduce your country to Third World status.
Speaking of my grandchildren and the air they will grow up breathing, the water they will grow up drinking and the climate they will have to learn to endure, how is it that the best a serious candidate for the Republican presidential nomination could manage when asked about global warming and climate change was: "I'm a skeptic." Translate that into policy, and you've got nothing.
This man is from Florida, where sea levels are already rising. Ask the guy in Miami who picks up a sodden newspaper outside his condo door four mornings out of seven. There's no leak in the outdoor plumbing. It's the Atlantic Ocean come to call.
Every dependable poll not manipulated by Fox News shows clearly that the American people are anxious about climate change. When species native to the subtropics appear in Georgia and South Carolina, when birch trees begin to die off in northern lower Michigan, something is up, and it isn't good.
Wind and solar energy sources have every conceivable roadblock thrown before them by a Congress and legislatures in thrall to the oil and gas lobbies.
This nation is not a democracy. It is a plutocracy moving toward an absolute oligarchy in which hedge funds are thought to approximate the acme of commerce and hedge fund proprietors the demigods of society. Men and women out of work are blithely told in effect that the education they were given and degrees earned no longer make them eligible to participate in a global economy. Have a nice day.
The idea that "all men are created equal," as the composers of the Declaration of Independence had it, and as Abraham Lincoln applied it to former slaves as well as their one-time owners, does not suggest that the permanence of equality's original creation depends on how many boots of others are licked or bootstraps pulled up in singular effort. It means that the dignity of everyone thus blessed in a kingless democracy shall be respected and not overrun by institutions, corporations or political blocs but encouraged and assisted in realizing that equality.
That's what a democracy is and ought to be about. That is not what the United States of America is or is about at present.
What happens between now and November 8, 2016, will tell us whither we shall go and under what aegis. We will elect someone who wants to be president because it's a really cool job, or someone who would remind us of such giants as Abraham Lincoln or Franklin D. Roosevelt -- presidents who came to see so much that was wrong about what was supposed to have been a democracy and gave their lives to fix it.
I hope for my grandchildren's sake it is the latter. Is it too much to hope that Lincoln's vision of a government of, by and for the People -- that is, an actual democracy -- may be realized in this century?
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