HAPPY BIRTHDAY AMERICA

HAPPY BIRTHDAY AMERICA

Happy Birthday America.

Now blow out the candles and make a wish.

Not so easy this year, is it?

In the past, your greatest dreams were your fondest wishes.  

In 1776, you wished for independence and wrote a manifesto on liberty rooted in the intellectual high ground of enlightened reason and natural rights.

In 1865, you wished for an end to fratricide, understanding that the end could come only by repudiating the hypocrisy that enslaved some in the service of a proclaimed equality for all.

In 1885,  you wished that the world would send you its "huddled masses yearning to breathe free," planted this wanted sign on liberty's statue in New York's harbor, and then welcomed untold millions in the greatest immigration wave the world has ever seen.

In 1918 and 1945,  you wished for world peace and sent millions of you own abroad in search of that goal.  In between, you wished for shared prosperity and deputized a government to make possible what greed had made unattainable.

In 1965, you wished for a color-blind society, and enlisted law in the service of that aim. Forty-three years later, in 2008, you came closer than ever to making that wish a reality.

What will you wish for this year?

You are in serious trouble.  You are being led, such as it is, by an insecure demagogue who demands loyalty instead of competence,  an unschooled and immature narcissist with neither the ability to do his job nor the willingness to learn.  He is a man-child permanently stuck at adolescence, all ego and little id, shallow, mean spirited and often just cruel.  Lacking impulse control, he is willing at every turn to insult and demean any who oppose or criticize.  His dishonesty is pathological.

In a family, this is  fatal, which is why he has had three of them. 

In a business, this can be fatal as well, which is why so many of his have failed.

In a country, however, these traits invite catastrophe.

Over the course of the last six months, he has spurned allies and empowered at least one enemy. Perhaps (we do not yet know and he denies it) complicit in -- and in any case incompetently silent on -- Russian interference in last year's election, he degrades a free  press, labeling fake what is true.  As he journeys to Hamburg this week to confront our enemy, but his apparent friend, the free world shudders at the prospect of what such an entente could entail.  

There are no immediate solutions.  

Time may provide an opportunity for correction.   But if provided, reason would still have to prevail.

It did not last year.

So Happy Birthday America.

Blow out the candles.

And wish wisely.