Thomas Jefferson is purported to have once said, “All democracies eventually commit suicide.” No matter how much we venerate his memory, everyone now understands that he had as many faults as the rest of us. That’s not to devalue his inestimable contributions but to remember that he lived in times even more critical than we and frequently made decisions that contradicted his public statements and were in retrospect clearly wrong.
We have a tendency to believe that politics have never been worse than they are now, but as dangerous as they are it is important not to forget the seemingly insurmountable problems our founding fathers faced. The most amazing thing is that we are still dealing with many of the same issues. To mention only a few consider the arguments in the Constitutional Convention about who is going to have the most power, the states or a strong federal government. The question of slavery, never mentioned by name in the Constitution, took another 80 years and more than 600,000 deaths to settle. Then there was the matter of taxes; who will levy them and how will they be expended.
Just those three areas are still problematic today and that’s only a smattering of the difficulties we face that go back to antiquity. They all have their origins millennia before those three tiny ships, the Susan Constant, the Godspeed, and the Discovery, sailed up the James River and decided it looked like a good place to start a new nation. I suspect that idea never occurred to them. A more likely thought was gratitude they had survived. When you look at the reproduction of those ships, the idea of crossing the ocean in one seems to be a sure recipe for disaster.
After 1607 things quickly got worse. Diseases totally devastated the settlers, starvation was a constant threat. Then there were the problems with the Indians who, despiteoffering initial help for the new inhabitants, turned out, understandably, to be less than supportive of their white neighbors. In the first year, a nameless occupant of Jamestown said he could not imagine that his head could hold the amount of water to supply the tears he had shed since he set foot on that marshy headland.
It would be more than one hundred fifty years before the problem of how the government would be structured, what to do about the slavery question, and who was going to set tax policy became questions that led to bloodshed.
Bringing these and other problems to mind gives credence to the saying, “There is nothing new under the sun.” Living today is just as fraught with danger as it was for our ancestors. Our ability to manage it is vastly different, but arguably no better; we just have different techniques for doing so.
It is easy to despair in the face of all the difficulties we face but they pale in comparison to what the vast majority of the world lives with on a daily basis. Even though we are deluged with information about the disasters others endure, we remain sanguine and take for granted that we are entitled to our advantages. We continue to be plagued with how power is shared between the federal government and the states. Racism, albeit in many forms, marginalizes all ethnic minorities. And don’t forget about April 18 and paying taxes. Now we find that perhaps the richest among us contain individuals and clever corporations who find ways to avoid taxes shifting the responsibility to those for whom the payment is a significant burden.
That we have plethora of capable leaders seems to be in great doubt which brings up several salient points. As disgusting as the present political scene is playing out, as many problems we as a democratic society face and with the fabric of what we call America is being stretched to its limits, we cannot give up. Our forebears didn’t and ancestors since the beginning of time didn’t quit. Neither can we.
I have heard sensible people say they are not going to vote this fall because the choices are so bad. Then we must do something that changes the system so we have reasonable men and women to guide us. If we don’t then we are loading the gun and preparing to prove Thomas Jefferson’s grim assessment of national suicide.
Hayden Hollingsworth
