Was America the Rock-Solid Fortress Always Just a Fragile House of Cards?
Da Nang, Vietnam, May 18th, 2024.
Salaroche

The longest-standing Democracy in the world, the One Nation with Constitutional equal rights for all, a country where reason stands proudly over basic passions and lower instincts, a society generally optimistic about the future, a system of government of the people, by the people, and for the people, the land of the free and the home of the brave. In other words: The United States of America.

And then there is the laudable will of its citizens, always thriving to achieve a more perfect Union… wait… What am I talking about here? Am I talking about the United States as it was or about the United States as it is right now? Or, am I only talking about the United States as it was ideally conceived? Has America ever lived up to its ideals? No, it has not. Sociopolitical progress in America always seems to take two steps forward and one step backward, or one step forward and two steps backward but, in the long run, it has always seemed to be moving ahead.

On January 20th, 2009, when Barack Obama was initially inaugurated as the first African-American President of the United States, the nation seemed indeed poised to take long strides toward achieving a more perfect Union. On that day, in the eyes of millions of Americans and in the eyes of the world, American ideals seemed quite within reach. On that day, the promise of equality of races and genders embedded in the American Democratic experiment was self-evident. Or so, many of us thought.

Alas! Such hopeful vision was not shared by many influential Americans up in the circles of power. Quite the opposite. From that moment on, many Americans have stood on a war footing against the structures of government that facilitated Barack Obama’s advent to the White House.

Obama shattered their perverted dream of an unwavering, constant, everlasting white-supremacist dominance over the American sociopolitical landscape and they saw the American Democratic and Judicial Systems as the direct culprits for such injurious offense. Ultimately, they thought it was the Constitution of the United States that had betrayed them. Something drastic had to be done about it.

And if rigging the Democratic and Judicial systems and blatantly disregarding any Constitutional mandates didn’t do the job, those systems and documents would have to be disabled or eliminated. In other words, the United States would have to cease to be a Democracy and the rule of law, along with the American Constitution, would have to be replaced by the will of a strongman ruling over a one-party system of government. And those are the circumstances in which we find ourselves today.

Most of us always thought of the United States as a rock-solid fortress that no sociopolitical or economic storm could bring down, but now it seems we may have been quite naïve in thinking that way. We never took into consideration that a domestic foe as powerful as the Republican Party could ever manage to undermine the foundations of the nation as much as they have, and we were utterly wrong on this count.

America the rock-solid fortress is turning out to have been only a mirage all along. To the detriment of the whole world, the ominous way in which things are going, America may end up showing it was always just a fragile, vulnerable House of Cards.  

Salaroche