America has come face-to-face with its fall from grace and the build-up that eventually led to the last four years has taken its toll on the soul of this country. That is the opinion of many, including major Australian newspaper, The Canberra Times, who wrote in an article on this very topic: “We are witnessing the fall of a great power.”
The truth is, contrary to what Donald Trump claims, most of the modern world is looking down upon the United States now. The coronavirus pandemic has put a laser focus on just how poor a job the United States is doing with 217,000 dead and approaching 8 million cases — and with our current leadership, the end to that nightmare is nowhere in sight.
As the election draws near, we have to worry about militia poll watchers and if our vote will even be counted as America gets pushed over the edge.
The Canberra Times columnist Crispin Hull wrote:
Look at the U.S. now, Its president is so psychiatrically disordered with narcissism that he is incapable of dealing with the COVID-19 crisis in a coherent, empathetic way. Everything he says and does is through a prism of himself. He has now turned his whole re-election campaign into one of race hate, law and order and a bizarre invention of a threat from ‘left-wing fascists.”
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This has unfortunately been proven true again and again — the COVID death rate still rising, the vain threats of LAW & ORDER, and made-up threats about left-wing fascists have all continued since the piece was penned. Hull continues to open the reader’s eyes to the current situation in America:
The underlying weakness in present U.S. democracy is that partisanship has become so extreme that the nation is incapable of dealing with the major issues that face it,” Hull continued. “COVID-19 has illustrated that starkly, with every word and act predicated on party allegiance. Meanwhile, other problems like race, police violence, gun control, inequality, the health system, climate change, and energy policy go unattended.”
That partisanship has grown into a bubble that’s about to burst. With the election just weeks away, political issues have bled into most of our lives and forced us to choose a side. Things such as mask-wearing, climate change, or civil rights shouldn’t be such highly contested issues but in Trump’s America that is, unfortunately, the case. Hull reaches the pinnacle of his article by stating:
[Trump] has undermined the Supreme Court with appointments based on politics, not law…The system has become so warped that those disenfranchised, disempowered, and disenchanted are taking to the streets, questioning the legitimacy of the whole system. The only question is whether the taking to the streets can break these vicious circles, or whether it is just another step in the decline and fall of a great power.”
As Trump and the GOP attempt to push another Supreme Court Justice that will tip the scales of the U.S. for years to come, we as a nation have to come to a realization: We have fallen and our only choice going forward is to build back better.
Featured image via Flickr/Gage Skidmore, under Creative Commons license 2.0
