My father died a couple of weeks before his 100th birthday back in 1999, and was born 111 years after the ratification of the U.S. Constitution in 1789 and 109 years after the Bill of Rights was ratified. In one single lifetime, he witnessed some of the major changes in American society and some of its defining events.
He was born during the Galveston hurricane that left some 8,000 dead, and it was during his lifetime that he had to deal with all of the generational problems of his era – from the McKinley to the Kennedy assassinations, from World War I to World War II, from the first flight of the Wright Brothers to the explosion of the first atomic bombs, and from the Great Depression to the New Deal and Social Security.
Many other eventful things happened during his 100 years of life, but the point here is merely to show that in the chaotic world of today we seem to have lost the meaning of what the “democratic process” is all about. The great fear of the day is that the Trump Administration has placed our democracy in danger by giving rise and support to white supremacists and that the Democrats are doing the same by giving in to the Black Lives Matter movement, both of which are composed of people who thrive on chaos.
While there is a sliver of truth to both arguments, there is a much greater truth that we seem to have forgotten, one which the COVID-19 epidemic brings to mind. My father’s long life showed me that generational problems do not end automatically at the end of an era; they change focus, direction, and intensity as they continue. World Wars I and II gave us Hitler, just as the Great Depression gave us Social Security. This is what the COVID-19 epidemic is showing us today, making us understand that the vaccine will not be the end of the virus and making us realize it will continue.
It is this understanding that makes us comprehend that for us to be safe, we do not have to eradicate the virus but that we need to bring it under control knowing it will surge again because of its propensity to renew itself. This is the lesson we need to follow so that our “democratic process” can function effectively.
We seem to have forgotten that the “democratic process” is not based on the relationship among the three branches of government, the rapport among the states, government, or even the connection between the voters. The success of our democratic process experiment is mostly determined by the manner in which these generational problems are woven into the democratic mantle and how the political system handles them.
Our political system was not created as a definitive socio-political entity designed to handle specific problems, but one which requires all of us to adapt our own realities to a political system focused not on individual problems but on the common good. Each generation has to face its own problems, and each person has to adapt his reality to the new emerging national consciousness that shapes its generation and renovates the future.
As such, the chaos of today will linger on into the future, leaving the coming generation with the responsibility of dealing with this reality through the framework of our Constitution. This will not be an easy task because each new reality requires a new balance between order and freedom, rights and privileges, dissent and defiance, all of which the people have to accept and the political system has to provide. This is what our forefathers did when they incorporated a political reality based on the ideology of “divine right of kings” into a novel political system in which the people ruled, and this is what an agricultural society did with the coming of the industrial revolution, and when a rural society became an urban one.
All of these generational changes took place while the people continued to be governed by a Constitution drafted at a time of a colonial reality.
This is what Americans have done to maintain our democratic process, and this is what Americans must continue to do as today’s reality shifts from an industrial national economy to a high-tech global market and alters our individual realities. We need to understand that our problems are the nation’s problems, and that our problems will not end with our generation but that they continue, leaving us and the following generations with the responsibility of searching for balance, and the democratic process requires us to manage and control not only the problems we created but those which emerged from previous generations.
This is what gives us our continuity as a state, and our task is to demand personal changes so that our new reality can be made compatible to law and order, liberty and justice, equality and merit. Only by striving to search for this balance can we can meet the main objective of our political experiment — to secure the blessing of liberty for ourselves and our posterity.
Acquiring these rights is our responsibility, and the role of the political system is merely to “secure” them. This is the connection that maintains our democratic process.
Thank you for sharing, Fernando.