"It's not the people who vote that count. It's the people who count the votes."
Welcome to the Banana Republic of America, where a candidate's lead of hundreds of thousands of votes vanishes magically in the dark midnight hours as more "batches" of ballots are delivered long past the voting deadline. It's where more "voters" in a state than actual legally registered voters can cast their ballots. This is now a country where election laws are openly flouted, ubiquitously and with impunity. My native land appears to me as an unfamiliar hell-scape of corruption.
Today I am very sad for my country. I'm even more grieved at the thought of my grandchildren growing up in such a corrupted, controlled and hateful political environment.
All of my grandparents immigrated here to build a better life, and they did. My parents' generation worked and fought hard to expand on those dreams. The Boomers, of which I am one, had life too good for too long. Too many of us forgot the precious gift that is liberty; too many of our children were not taught, and do not appreciate, the miracle that is America. Thus today we find ourselves afraid to speak our minds and hesitant to act on our values, fearful of social and economic repercussions, cowed into silence by the vicious intolerance of the "others." These are not the conditions in which freedom flourishes, and so we find ourselves losing it.
We also find ourselves in an election crisis that will not end well for either presidential candidate or for the country. The winner, although still undeclared, will be forever tainted by this disgraceful voting controversy. Too many Americans no longer trust our elections, or any of our institutions. We are divided into two warring camps to an extent not seen since the Civil War. How might this tortured state of affairs end for us?
In The Outline of History, Vol. 1, H.G. Wells covers in fascinating forensic depth the collapse of the Roman Empire. But Wells sums up the fall of Rome in just one succinct sentence: "The essence of its failure was that it could not sustain unity." Those words should be an urgent warning to us today, the citizens of what once was the promised land of E Pluribus Unum.
