America at a crossroad: How fragile is the superpower?

Today’s Republicans hold the cherished belief that what made America great was unrestricted reward for enterprise. But how much polarisation is being generated by the almost one million foreclosures on home mortgages due to the belief that financiers could be enterprising to their heart’s content? How much polarisation is there when there are 24 million (unofficially) unemployed? How much polarisation is being caused by the Republicans wanting to pay off the national debt, not by taxing the well off, but by reducing the services to the working class?

Adding more gunpowder to the charge is a population of a size that is exceeded only by India and China. There is a decreasing amount of space to put a rapidly increasing population. Millions are crossing the border with Mexico. All of these people are adding to the already great amount of poverty in the US. It is a poverty that shocks Australian tourists.

Times have changed while fundamental aspirations have not

I sometimes hear people say: “That’s a long time ago”. By this they are implying that those passed events are no longer relevant. To me, a century and a half is not that long ago. When I was born, Union and Confederate veterans were still holding their respective annual encampments. A great-grandmother I remember vividly was born a year before the American Civil War ended.

Unfulfilled expectations fuel resentment. In 1861 black Americans had no expectations to be unfilled. They lived in fear of whites that had all the money and all the guns. Today African Americans are more likely to feel anger than fear. They may not have much money, but they have expectations of a better life - and they have guns.

In the war of 1861-1865, armies of uniformed men supported by artillery faced each other in open fields. A major factor in the early ineptitude of the much larger army of the North and the ultimate defeat of the South when its luck ran out was a lack of communication between widely separated senior officers. Today there are mobile phones to network hundreds of revolutionary cells. We are seeing the role such networking is playing in the people movements in the Middle East now.  

A firefight between that part of the population crying for bread and the other saying “let them eat cake” may seem to be impossible - but in 1932, tanks were used against a demonstration of army veterans demanding payment they did not receive - and in 1970, 13 students were gunned down by the Ohio National Guard at Kent State University. Nobody thought that possible, either.