I love my country – always have. And I’m not alone. But – perhaps because we have been through so much as a young country – we tend to see our country as indestructible. We think we can recover our republic, our democracy from any damage. We’ve become lazy, complacent.
America has always been witness to a ‘David and Goliath’ existence. But we the people (‘David’) have had a remarkable ally: The U.S. Constitution. In the 1930s ‘40s, we the people had a champion – two champions, really: President Franklin Roosevelt and First Lady, Eleanor. Both were born into great wealth. They were the monied class. The time was the Great Depression when the American people had no hope. There was great suffering. The ‘Dust Bowl,’ a time of unprecedented drought and dust storms forced an exodus of farmers from the
Great Plains into homelessness. Elderly Americans were starving. There were no safety nets. The stock market crashed, banks failed, there was a vast unequal distribution of wealth. Desperation and injustice plagued the land.
President Roosevelt, a man of vision, a man of compassion, created programs to put people back to work (the WPA work projects). He instituted a program to help the elderly. That program was Social Security. He lifted this country out of the Depression. And he led this country to victory in World War II. He was a Democrat.
The monied class, represented by the Republican Party, hated Roosevelt. They called him a traitor to his class. Roosevelt famously responded, “I welcome their hate!”
This “class war” didn’t begin in the ‘30s. It has deep roots in our human history. And always the working class and the poor (the majority) suffered.
The US is the greatest experiment of a republic, a democracy. In Ben Franklin’s words, this is a great republic, “if we can keep it.”
ATTENTION AMERICA: We have never been closer to losing our Republic.