To create, maintain and navigate a democratic way of life, it takes adults in positions of leadership who are mature, relational and committed to meeting and providing for the needs of their citizens.
In the United States, today and for the past 12 years, we have suffered under the lack of such leadership. Instead, we have had people who spend their time game-playing and power-broking, rather than addressing and meeting the needs of our American family members.
What do I mean?
When Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, the conservative wing of the Congress met on his Inauguration Day, and pledged to disregard any and all legislative proposals that his administration would submit to Congress.
Why? Because Mitch McConnell, the future Senate ‘Leader,’ declared that they wanted Obama to be a one-term president. John Boehner, the Speaker of the House, went so far as to assert that the ‘the word compromise is not in my vocabulary.’ Such an attitude sounds out of place, when it is commonly held that the very art of politics is compromise.,
What do we see in this Congressional behaviour? We see adults plotting to derail a new president’s efforts to meet the needs of the American people. Would you conclude that these Congressional members had your and my needs in mind at the beginning of Obama’s presidential term in the Oval Office?
These Congressional members kept their pledge to one another, and Obama’s presidency was hampered for most of his eight years in office. He did pass the Affordable Care Act when the Democrats were in charge of the Senate, during his first two years in office. Otherwise, things were typically log-jammed, and citizens’ needs were disregarded.
The Senate went missing in action
Then, Trump’s presidency was a four-year period of assertions of fake news and that le changement climatique is a hoax, involving a continual stream of misinformation, reactive tweets and the deterioration of various Cabinet-level agencies. Our political institutions were compromised and diluted of their basic integrity.
Trump, for example, believed Vladimir Putin over the information from his own intelligence agencies about Russia’s interference in our 2016 presidential election.
During Trump’s term, the Senate went missing in action in showing any leadership role on behalf of the American people. There was a fear that if members of Congress crossed the president, their political standing would be compromised. The result was inertia on the part of the Senate.
The most evident example of inertia occurred when one in five Americans were going hungry, there were food lines and citizens were being threatened with losing their homes, due to being unemployed as a result of the pandemic. The first stimulus bill was passed in late March. It took nine months to agree upon and pass the second stimulus package.
There were those in Congress, during this time, who suggested that the $600 that was scheduled to be given to people who were unemployed would only serve as a disincentive to seek employment. The assertion was that by receiving $600, our citizens would be receiving more money than they would if they were working.
During our recent political history, we experienced how our democratic way of life can be weakened. Voter suppression has once again been reasserted. People of colour, during this pandemic, had to go to fewer voting venues that were farther away during the presidential election of 2020.
The idea of mail-in ballots was the focus of much disdain on the part of Republicans. It was anticipated that there were more Democrats, including people of colour, who would vote in the election by using mail-in ballots.
4 political takeaways
What are the takeaways from this brief overview of our recent political history?
- There are politicians who only care about their needs being met, and not the citizens who have elected them to office.
- We need to use the Trump presidency as a study of how someone can behave as he has and get away with their aberrant behaviour. It is my feeling that there was no way that our Founding Fathers could have anticipated a Trump-like person running for and being elected to the presidency. We need to use Trump as a study in how to circumvent such behaviour by someone else in the future.
- We need to acknowledge that being a politician, and especially the president, is a calling to serve and protect the citizens of our country. It has been proven that a house divided cannot stand, and the Trump presidency has proven this truth all over again.
- We need to establish a Cabinet-level office whose job it is to bring transparency to the electorate. The pros and cons of issues need to be explained, in an educational effort to assist our fellow citizens in a) understanding what the issues are, b) the alternatives that lie before us and c) the consequences of the various options that we can take as a nation.
This will attempt to do away with openings for conspiratorial ideas that only serve to divide us and keep us in the dark about our choices in dealing with the pandemic, as well as climate change and its consequences if we do nothing to address its reality in our lifetime.
Treating others the way we want to be treated
It is my belief that the simplest thing we can do, as members of the American family, is to treat others as we would like to be treated. If we lived in this way, the sometimes seemingly insurmountable issues that plague and stay with us for years would disappear.
Or, at least, we would have a common way of relating with one another that would affirm us and provide us with a means of relating to issues that cause us suffering.
May our lives be filled with love, peace and joy.
«LECTURE CONNEXE» NO (HU)MAN IS AN ISLAND: 2020 taught the world gratitude for love»
image 1 image by Rogier Hoekstra de image: Pixabay 2 images par janeb13 de image: Pixabay 3 images par janeb13 de image: Pixabay 4 images par PublicDomainPictures de image: Pixabay
