Parallels

The tragic collapse of a 12-story condominium tower on Miami Beach on June 24, 2021, has parallels with what is currently wrong with our American democracy.  Both were originally designed with good intent based on the best knowledge of the day.  While the foundations were initially strong, they were eroded over time.  The foundations were weakened, and needed maintenance was neglected or postponed.  The ultimate result, tragedy.

In the case of the building, people saw the cracked concrete, the rusted exposed reinforcing steel, and the standing water.  People knew that ocean water was seeping into the lower structure on king tides.  As the expense of maintenance was delayed, the estimated costs nearly doubled.  People saw the need to make repairs, but nobody was willing to pay.  Now that the structure has collapsed, everyone pays, and some have made the ultimate payment.

While it will be some time before the specific causes for the building’s collapse are identified, it is almost certain to be a combination of many things.  A whole litany of factors contributed to the failure of the entire structure.  Certainly, this building was designed to last more than 40 years, but it was not properly maintained.  Even climate change and rising sea levels may have been partly to blame.

Like this building, our American democracy was designed to last a long time.  It had a strong foundation upon which we built our hopes and dreams.  It has so far stood the test of time through two world wars and countless assaults.  But today we find that the foundation is crumbling, and its structural integrity is threatened.  Our two ruling parties are so deeply divided that recently one of those parties threatened its members with a loss of committee assignments if any of them broke ranks and cooperated with the other side.  For a democracy designed to function with two parties debating the issues and using compromise to make difficult decisions, this was certainly a serious crack in the foundation.

Many idly watched as a corrupt president attacked our core values.  He fanned the flames of racial hatred and religious intolerance.  He provided cover for a minority faction of our society to vent their loathing of Jews, Blacks, Asians, Hispanics, and members of the gay communities.  He used this hatred to protest his loss of the presidency in a fair election through a treasonous insurrection conducted in our nation’s capital.  He has used the power of this group of supporters to shift the Republican party to the extreme right where cooperation or compromise is seen as weakness or failure.  He has brought our nation to the brink of collapse by attacking its foundation.  He would rather see this country fail if he can’t have things his way.  Donald Trump and his Republican supporters are the corrosive salts eating away at the very substructure of this democracy.

Without a working Congress and positive legislative advancements, this country will fail.  The historical engineering report that will document our nation’s collapse will note many individual failures and causal factors.  Among them will be:

• A failure to address climate change that resulted in drought, sea-level rise, crop failures, food insecurity, and extreme weather-related events.

• A failure to address our crumbling infrastructure that resulted in electrical grid failures, information network failures, structural transportation network failures, job loss, and economic disaster.

• A failure to address gun reform continued the carnage in our schools and neighborhoods.

• A failure to address immigration reform and its root causes that resulted in a continuation of an uncontrolled influx of migrants.

• A failure to address the need for renewable energy that exacerbated climate change and furthered our dependence on limited resources.

• A failure to address affordable health care forced our citizens into situations where their continued wellbeing depended upon the size of their bank accounts.

• A failure to address the problems associated with equal opportunities for a college or technical education allowed the decline of our status as a world economy and we saw a rise in economic inequality.

• A failure to better manage our budget deficit served to only postpone the inevitable collapse of our economy.

• A failure to address racism, sexism, and religious persecution widened the divide in America and hastened its collapse.

These are but a few of the things eroding the very foundation of our democratic way of life.  We can no longer postpone the needed repairs.  We can no longer ignore the damage being done in the name of nationalism, patriotism, isolationism, party politics, and white supremacy.  We will put off the long overdue maintenance on the foundations of democracy at our ultimate peril.  Stop the hatred.  Stop listening to the mentally ill grifting conman from New York now living in Florida.  Stop his supporters from using his hate-mongering to their own ends.  Save our democracy before it collapses in a pile of rubble.

The events of January 6 and June 24 were both tragedies.  Both were preventable.  Both present us with lessons to be learned to prevent similar occurrences.  We need to investigate the causes of both to help us understand how we can prevent them from happening again.  As we have seen, maintenance of foundations is extremely important and delays are costly and deadly.