The U.S. is experiencing the most serious political crisis in our nation’s history.
Even during the Civil War, although the slave-owning states tried to break away, the rest of the U.S. still believed in democracy (although even the North did not practice it well enough). Now Big Money has corrupted elections, and in some states the Republican Party is deliberately preventing some kinds of people from voting, and in some states that party is refusing to respect the voters’ decisions.
Political corruption has occurred in some ways over the years, but now the person in the White House is blatantly using the U.S. government as a way to make himself and his family even richer. Also, to a scale unprecedented in U.S. history, he has appointed many, many cabinet members and other top officials specifically so they can pervert the U.S. government and endanger the entire nation’s health and safety in order to enrich the business corporations from which he recruited him.
The U.S. has always valued a free press, but now many newspapers are closing, so many towns and cities have only one print viewpoint, and giant right-wing corporations have bought up a huge number of newspapers, radio stations and TV stations, so right-wing propaganda dominates the public’s thinking in major areas in the U.S. The person in the White House calls journalists “the enemy.”
Throughout our nation’s history, the U.S. occasionally went to war, but for the past 70 years the U.S. has been almost continually fighting wars, arming dictators and overthrowing democracies. Since 2001 the U.S. has been fighting (and failing to win) multiple unwinnable wars in different places, and Congress has refused to use its Constitutional responsibility to decide when to declare wars.
The Civil Rights Movement, the Women’s Movement, civil libertarians, and other grassroots movements worked for decades to expand and protect people’s civil rights and civil liberties, to make the U.S. a more civilized and more humane nation, but now the Republican-dominated federal and state governments are pushing as hard as they can in the OPPOSITE direction to take away people’s rights and to make oppression WORSE.
Since the late 1960s and early 1970s a big grassroots movement pushed the federal government to take environmental problems seriously and to start solving them. Congress, the President, and federal agencies took serious actions that made significant progress. More recently a strong grassroots movement started pushing to solve the climate crisis. But now the federal government is pushing as hard as it can in the OPPOSITE direction, deliberately making the environment and the climate WORSE.
The list of extremely serious problems goes on and on and gets worse and worse, especially in recent years.
This is an EXISTENTIAL CRISIS that endangers our nation’s survival as a free society.
We need to UNDERSTAND this crisis — and we need to SOLVE it.
Throughout 2017 I wrote a pretty comprehensive essay about how we got into this mess and how to get out of it. I strongly encourage people to read this 29-page article that I finished and published in November 2017. It is long but informative, insightful, and still valid now. We need to UNDERSTAND the problems before we can figure out how to solve them. Here is the link:
How We Got into Our Current Crisis – And How to Get Out — THOROUGH article
The essay above and the two essays below explain that the problems are NOT limited to the Republican Party. The problems stem from a larger worldview that transcends political party and has gotten worse in recent decades, even before the 2016 election. In order to solve the problems, we need to understand that larger worldview that has been hurting the U.S. for a long time, and especially recently.
I wrote two very thorough essays about the dominant worldview — the first essay focusing mostly on the problems and the second essay focusing mostly on the solutions and how to accomplish them. These two essays are summarized in my November and December 2018 TV programs. BOTH ESSAYS and links to watching BOTH TV PROGRAMS are at this link. The TV videos are one-hour summaries, so I strongly encourage you to READ BOTH ESSAYS. The essays also include links to more information. Each essay starts with a Table of Contents, so you can read parts of the essays on different occasions even if not all at once.
Both are at this link. In encourage you to read this link’s November essay and then the December essay::
Worldviews ESSAY based on PART 2 — December 2018
