I try not to be a very political person, but today I'm making an exception. I want to make this a general reflection about things that have been going through my head, rather than a specific political rant. I'm not sure if it will end up making sense to anyone except me, but I need to get this off my chest.
For anybody who reads this and doesn't know, I grew up in the U.S. but have lived in Canada for more than half my life now. This gives me a bit of a split viewpoint as I follow recent news and provides a lot of interesting material for conversation with my Canadian husband. History and Civics were never my best subjects in high school, but I'm finding myself able to remember things from those long-ago classes. I don't have a comprehensive set of details filed in my brain, but I do remember some of the basic principles we talked about at length.
I particularly remember a lot of discussion about "checks and balances". For non-Americans reading this, the U.S. federal government is divided into three branches -- legislative, executive, and judicial (i.e. Congress, President & Supreme Court). These checks and balances consist of a lot of rules in the constitution and later amendments, spelling out rules for how these three branches work together. That includes things that each branch is supposed to do, things each branch is forbidden to do, and ways in which the three interact in both positive and negative ways. I just found a nice little easy-to-read overview of this at https://bensguide.gpo.gov/j-check-balance.
Setting aside personal political feelings, I'm reflecting that we're living in "interesting times", seeing a lot of these principles being demonstrated and tested and speculated about. The president has the right under vaguely defined sorts of circumstances to declare a state of emergency and do an end run around congress to get something done. The current president is certainly not the first one to do this. The president has the right to veto bills passed by congress and the congress has the right to override those vetoes if they have a strong enough majority. (And the Congress is divided into two houses, which sometimes cooperate and sometimes fight like cat & dog.) The president appoints Supreme Court justices but Congress has to approve those appointments and Congress can impeach justices. The Supreme Court can "interpret" bills and consider precedents set by presidents and congress.
The principle behind all this is to spread power evenly between a large number of people so that it's harder to have one person or a small group of people hijack everything. One can think of it like a three-legged table; when all
three legs are working well the legs provide stability and make it
harder to tip the table over than if it were balanced on just a single
pedestal or two legs. Or like a responsible adult sitting down with
three squabbling children and telling them "you are going to have to
find a way to calm down and work things out between you".
If you look at it another way it feels like a recipe for chaos. Anyone who has tried to get even something small done by a group of people with vastly different opinions and backgrounds knows how difficult and unpleasant this can be. So much simpler to have a single leader or small, homogeneous group that makes the hard decisions and for everyone to follow them. But also much more dangerous.
I remember some discussions about politics with my parents many years ago, agreeing that the ideal form of government might be a benevolent dictator -- someone wise enough to take all the hard decisions off of our hands and save everyone else the hard work of those messy decisions. But the conversation went on to the obvious question: where do we find one of those? And if we miraculously found the perfect parental figure to lead us all in a perfect way, what happens when he or she dies or wants to retire?
I'm thinking that the current state of the U.S. is a perfect example of this whole dilemma. The government is looking like a jigsaw puzzle that just won't fit together into a whole. Different individuals and groups within it have very different ideas of what is right and what should be done -- not just about immigration but about many other things as well. It's chaos and it's hard to watch. We all wish for wisdom and unity in high places. Although if we examined that wish we would almost certainly find that we have widely different opinions about what wisdom (or even unity) would mean at the present time.
I'm kind of meandering towards a point here. When power is shared between many people, it can be very messy and inefficient and frustrating and nobody may get exactly what they want. But when power is concentrated in one person or one small homogeneous group, the risks are obvious. So as upset as I am to see my country of birth floundering around and in-fighting as they are right now I will take it over the other options. And I suddenly realised that I've run right back to Winston Churchill, who said "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.”
David and I just happened to finish watching the Ken Burns documentary about the Roosevelts and I was fascinated with FDR's time -- the depression and World War 2 and all of the changes and disagreements in those times. We are living in "interesting times" right now, but there have been interesting times before and there will be again and as long as we have the right to interact and discuss we'll get through it. History is an extremely messy process and I don't see a way around that.
If anyone reading this doesn't
like what I've written, that's OK. That's what life is about. We all
see it in smaller scales -- in families, workplaces, churches, local
organizations, etc. Sometimes the fighting and disagreements are very hard to take, but they seem to be a necessary part of life. The most we can hope for is to manage it with some degree of courtesy towards the other points of view. If you know me personally I'd be happy to talk. If you've just stumbled onto this page there's a limit to how much online arguing I can manage at the moment, but you still have the right to disagree.
OK, it's time to move from generalities to the current situation. I've got Trump's speech recording right now and I need to be a big girl and turn on the DVR and watch it from the beginning and find out what is going to happen next in this great drama. And then try to take deep breaths afterwards as the commentators argue about what it all means and what might happen next. And remind myself that although North America is going through an extremely difficult time right now the system is flexible enough that we're not stuck here. There is potential for compromise and for corrections.
