In his 1981 inaugural address, Ronald Reagan said, “In the eyes of many in the world, this every-four-year ceremony we accept as normal, is nothing less than a miracle.”
That ceremony Reagan spoke about was the culmination of the election, taken by the American citizenry, to determine the next president of the United States.
The current 2016 election seems less like a ceremony than it does as a reality show gone bonkers.
Anyone who once believed that democracy was a heavenly government taken on by a virtuous and wise citizenry, as J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur had, will undoubtedly have rubbed the scales from their eyes in dismay by this point.
The cynical crank will regard this election as the the physical manifestation of their pessimism and will feel vindicated in their belief in the fall of man.
Luckily, this election is neither.
The gloom and doom columnists and the half-literate Twitter mob have excited themselves into an unnecessary frenzy which has, in turn, created millions of frightened Americans fearing that the end times have come earlier than they would have preferred.
Every four years those ideological hinged columnists and the 140-character mobsters scream and rant that if so-and-so is elected, the world as we know it will end.
The reality is the world is not going to end. After-all, the world kept spinning when Al Gore lost in 2000, did it not?
Anyhow, any half-intelligent observer can tell you that the vice, vulgarity, pugnacity, and general parochiality that is exhibited by the candidates in this year’s federal election is normal.
Yes, normal. If seeing a candidate with a bright orange face flaunt his plasticised teeth and flailing his arms around as a mad man makes you uncomfortable, I am here to assure you that this is quite normal in American politics.
Democracies are not perfect; in fact, no form of government is. This is because humans are not perfect, and those humans who the citizenry of America choose to elect as their leader for a number of years are not perfect either.
It’s not as if every man or women a nation elects to lead it through times of struggle can be another Lincoln, Churchill, or Thatcher; such is rare in democracies.
American’s should be thankful that the system of representative government, which flowed from the pen of Madison, which Washington put into motion, and which both Lincoln and FDR gave their lives to defend, still works and is the envy of the world.
American’s should stop worrying about what all the Twitter sages and intellectually shallow columnists say about the end times being near if so-and-so gets elected; it is not up to those people to further the destiny of America.
The people will rule, and America is, as Lincoln said in his great Gettysburg Address, “(A government) of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
