Philadelphia November 7, 2016

As dawn must soon be breaking  on my Native land , and I listen to the mournful prelude to Act III of Tristan I must lament as Tristan.

Wo ich erwacht weilt' ich nicht;  doch, wo ich weilte,  das kann ich dir nicht sagen.  Die Sonne sah ich nicht,  noch sah ich Land und Leute:  doch, was ich sah,  das kann ich dir nicht sagen.

Where I awoke there I was not, but where I was I cannot tell you. I did not see the sun nor did I see Land and people, but what I did see I cannot tell you.

That’s about how I see my native land from the distance in this most awful year of 2016. I have not lived in the US since 1991 and have in the last fifteen  years spend a total  9 weeks in America and  have not been to my native Philadelphia in ten years ,  so I limited  currency in this  to  judge the state of the nation and people’s minds. When I think of  America I think of her as I left her in 1991 , not as she is now , which I see  only through the portals of media.   Through this lens  I see a growing factionalism and polarization reminiscent  of France in the 1780s , Spain in the  1930s , or the US in the 1850s  and we know what these  led to .

We have fueled an age of me and my with no shared values except the agreement of others who think just like us.  No matter who wins this election I fear for the future. We shall either have a president that respects power over  Law ( Just like Lenin or Stalin) or a president  with an extremely hostile Congress bent on Impeaching her before she even takes office and insuring no legislation will be able to be passed. One leads to clear dictatorship and the other can lead to something like the Indian Emergency under Indira Gandhi, and  there are those that will not accept the outcome of the election and will continue to turn to the Dark Side. As a career expatriate American I can assure you the rest of  world sees the US as weak and divided and into this void is stepping  other powers and forces, neither Make American Great Again or Love Trumps Hate will be able to fix this any time soon.  

So I am pessimistic. I don’t understand the logic of voting for people  you don’t trust? Both Parties nominated people which when  polled  they say they don’t trust or don’t like ?? They then elect a progressive forward thinking president but a regressive dead in the water congress? This is madness and madness has a price. Is the great American republic on the  brink of  political, military and economic collapse  as Rome in the 3^rd century?

We don’t live in a cartoon so don’t put  your faith in princes, no one man  or woman can fix these things, Rome had plenty of hard working let’s make the empire great again emperors in the 3rd century and all they did was end up defeated and dead , and the collapse continued.

And bring us together again is equally as fantastical  and  difficult to happen when each side sees the other as an incarnation of evil, what is the middle ground in this scenario?  What each side has to understand is that the other sides sees their opponents as dead wrong and each thinks the other will lead to catastrophe. Paraphrasing Lincoln (with apologies) , A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure, permanently, half progressive  and half  regressive . I do not expect the Union to be dissolved — I do not expect the house to fall — but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other. Either the opponents of progressive thought  will arrest the further spread of it…or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become accepted  in all the States red  as well as blue.

Well I have left out one thing, the fact that  man is a thinking and reasoning mammal  and that American is still by far greater than the rest and that the youth of today will pick up the shattered  mess and put it all together, that regressive leaders  will take a clue from Ayn Rand or Edmund Ruffin and American light will return to illuminate its  people and the world.

As an educator I  have  great faith in youth and hope I  live to see that day , if I can only get through the next few.