Are things getting better?

 

If you haven’t noticed, our government is dysfunctional.  It always has been.  When our Constitution veered off the noble course offered by our Declaration of Independence it was bound to fail.  It crashed first in a civil war that killed more Americans than all the wars our nation has fought in since then.  Abraham Lincoln (our most popular president) once wrote our Declaration is our “Apple of Gold”.  Our Constitution is the “Frame of Silver” around it.   Elected officials and the military must swear to protect the Constitution.  Not us, not each of our fundamental rights, not our security, and not the health of our environment which is the ultimate infrastructure sustaining our own health, wealth, and security.

The Constitution did protect our right to defend ourselves with muskets. And to freely speak or worship whatever we chose.   But those freedoms are useless against viruses, extreme weather conditions, failed states beyond of our borders, high paid lobbyists putting oil and corporate profits ahead of protecting our most basic infrastructure…the environment, cyber hackers anywhere in the world, a legal system lacking any true justice, an economic system rewarding the ultrarich and ignoring the rest, reactionary policies that are burying future generations in debt instead of investments in prevention, and a fourth amendment that makes our Constitution a suicide document instead of an system capable of the only legitimate function of any government (according to Thomas Paine) which is protecting human freedom and security.

If you have not noticed, things are worsening. Even after Trump lost the election.  It was even before our nation’s Trump experiment a survey of US national security experts were asked to rank our nation’s greatest threats.  They put terrorism on top.   And if you understood the future we face from the accelerating proliferation of every form of WMD - and the relative ease and affordable access that any foreign or domestic terrorist has to acquiring it -- without a background check – you would understand this ranking.  They identified our nation’s own ‘government dysfunction’ as our second greatest threat.  Ahead of Russia, China, N. Korea, Iran, and climate change.  A pandemic wasn’t even on their list.  It should have been.  And it was in past decades.   But this threat was then ignored.

I don’t blame politicians for this dysfunction.   We have the government we deserved.  The best that money can buy.  Not the best at engineering sustainable systems and structures to protect public health and safety.  These are things real engineers swear an oath to protect.

Those who first engineered the Constitution ignored fundamental principles offered by the “Laws of Nature and Nature’s God”.  They intentionally engineered it to work slowly.  Not a good idea now given the pace of change enhanced by advances in science and technologies that are globally accessible, increasingly affordable, and catastrophically more powerful.  And also largely anonymous.

Our Constitution was engineer on good ideas at the time.  Like balancing power between three bodies.  But power to do what?  Establish justice?  Insure domestic tranquility? Provide for the common defense?  Promote the general welfare?  Secure the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity?  These are what the framers intended.  But they gave us a flawed document doing none of these.   It can’t without us making monstrous changes in it.  It did give us -“We the “People” - that power and option.  But we largely ignored it believing the Constitution was sustainable without serious change.   It’s not!

And here’s why.

First:  It’s based on a concept that sounds reasonable.  Independence.  Yet that mental construct exists nowhere in the known universe.  In reality, everything we know of (natural and human made) is made up of systems and structures and everything…repeat “EVERYTHING” is interdependent.  NOTHING is independent.

Before 9-11 our CIA could not work with the FBI.  We tried to remedy that after 9-11 by creating the Department of Homeland Security in consolidating over a dozen federal agencies.  But didn’t link it to the Department of Defense.   WTF???

Consider the continuing chaos sparked by Covid19.  It was like an x ray exposing all the fractures between our primary government departments and even our state laws.

Panels on C-span focused on any aspect of national security repeatedly used several key phrases about what our nation needed:   “A wholistic approach..  A “comprehensive approach” …a “whole of government approach”.  A “whole of society approach”. And immediately after their suggestions for these - they cite the importance of investing in “resilience”.  Why?
Because consciously or unconsciously they know our government will not/cannot do those things as it is.  The separations between agencies, states, political parties and human clans (business or social) are to great.  And our minds cannot accept that fact that united we stand - and divided we fail.

Things change. Now, they are consistently changing for the worse.  Without adapting to change we have virtually no chance of keeping our head above water or our nation above China or catastrophic dysfunction.

If this projection leaves you hopeless…I highly recommend adopted Vaclav Havel’s functional definition of “hope”.   ‘Hope is not the expectation that things will change.  It is knowing what needs to change.  And working on it regardless of how it turns out.’

You need to chose.  Are you going to be a passenger in this cabin on spaceship earth …hoping for seat on the next rocket going to Mars?  Or, are you going to be a crew member on our mother planet – and doing what’s needed to unite humanity and halt this insanity.

 If that is your course.  Look no further than the need to fund and achieve the 17 Sustainable Development Goals. They are likely our last great hope of preserving what little civilization still exists.