United States in Crisis

Discontent in the US has been growing in the last few decades. I grew up in the late forties and fifties. We were comparatively content and united then. Eisenhower won with a landslide and was reelected with a landslide. He served as a popular president. And then things started downhill and have not stopped, and there is no indication of when they will stop. Sure, that is an oversimplification, but the general trend has been of forces driving us further and further apart, in not just two directions but in several different directions all at once. We have north and south, urban and rural, California and Texas opposed to each other. Then there are Europeans, Africans, Hispanic and Asians all feeling victimized and alienated. There are large states and small states. People from large cities and large states are complaining bitterly about the inequities of the electoral college and the makeup up of the senate. Rhode Island and Montana each have two senators and a few hundred thousand people. California has two senators and tens of millions of people.

It seems as if the country is splitting into sections. But the country has always been split into sections. From the very beginning, or in our case, the beginnings. The United States has no single beginning. It was started by different groups of people in different places. They all joined together, or tried to join together, to form a country. They are still trying. That is why our country is a federation, not a nation. A federation is a group of states bound together with a limited central government. Each state is different with different cultures and different peoples.

It remains to be seen if this discontent continues to grow. The hope is that it will not. The hope is our differences will begin to dissolve and we will be able to find goals, mores, rules and laws that we can agree on and live with. Right now, we are pretty far apart and becoming further apart. It is time to change our direction.

Ernest Harben