Is this the end of the America that the world looks up to?
The demise of the most democratic, diversified, and up until now, unified country that has ever existed. It's not going to bring an end to the lives of those involved, but it will kill the principals that this nation was founded on. With the election and the aftermath that has transpired, are we one the track to self destruction? Are we going to lose hope in the ideas that all men are created equal, and forget that every one of us, has the right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness"? Well, it certainly feels like it after this election.
As European historian Alexander Fraser Tytler once said, "a democracy is not permanent". After 200 years, through trials and triumphs, it begins to fall into decline.Thus far, the United States of America has escaped this doomsday prediction, lasting forty years longer than it was supposed to, according to Tytler's philosophy. He even came up with a timeline of events that a declining democracy would experience, and here lately, we have hit some of his mile markers head on. For instance, we went from a colony under the watchful eye of Great Britain, to become involved in the greatest religious epiphany of the day, the Great Awakening, and realizing that what England was doing, was wrong by us, and by God.
It was than that we happened upon the milestone of courage, and gained the audacity to fight back against our wrongdoers, namely the British Empire, all of which took place during the American Revolution. We then fought our way for eight long years to the milestone of liberty, free from the bondage of the British Empire, free to become a part of the democratic nation we had always dreamed of. As the decades rolled on, we hit some peaks of great abundance in everything that we did, whether that be gaining territories, becoming abundant in culture and liberties that the world had never seen before, and creating financial and material abundance when the Industrial Revolution took the world by storm.
We then hit the mile marker of selfishness, also during the Industrial Revolution and Victorian era, and this was because we began to see the rise of the class system, which was formerly one of our most hated aspects of Great Britain. We became exactly what we ran away and fought against from, all thanks to time, and the subsequent sequence of events. We were selfish in the sense that the lower classes, slaves, servants, free men and women, poor whites, and immigrants, simply did not matter. The upper classes, beginning with planter class before and during the Civil War, and finishing with the wealthy and corrupt industrialists such as Andrew Carnegie, Rockefeller, among many others, did not feel that they had to share their earnings with those who needed it the most. Which brought us to the mile marker: complacency.
The upper classes felt that all was well, partially due to the ideas of Social Darwinism and the idea that "if you were poor, it is due to your own mistakes" therefore, you do not deserve pity. It was also due to the idea complacency, the smug ideas that the wealthy and their counterparts had done what was right, and there were no problems in society that needed to be addressed. Our feelings of complacency brought us to one of the most unsatisfactory mile markers of Tytler's sequence of events for declining nations: apathy.
As a nation, we have been feeling the effects of apathy for the past century, and this is obvious when looking at events that transpired between the end of the Victorian era and now. When industrial workers revolted against their poor working conditions, we didn't give them the time of day. When Europe was in the midst of WWI, we turned our head. When we knew of what Germany was doing to "undesirables" during the second world war, we acted as if we never knew. When Civil Rights Activists rose up in the 1960s, we looked away. And now, we are looking away from what our new President has said, and plans to do.
As one nation, indivisible, we have become precisely what we despised in the British Empire, and more divided about our future than ever. Which brings us to one of the final stages of a falling democracy, dependency. Some would argue that we have surpassed this stage already, but I believe that it is just beginning. I believe that while we have become dependent on other countries, we are more dependent on the resilience of this nation and it's people, and most of all, on each other. In the past few days, after the election that the whole world has been dreading, we have become more dependent on each other than ever. We need each other to vent to, we need each other to protect our selves and our beliefs, and most of all, we need each other to come together as "one nation, under God, indivisible" to make it through the next few days, months, and year. As the greatest nation on earth, we have realized that if we don't come together, we will be on the brink of collapse.
