In fairness, in the USA it was the democratically elected people’s Congress that broke long before people started turning towards wanting more authoritarian control.
We can’t have nice things if we don’t keep them up, maintaining them properly.
Even in ye olden days there was never a time (before recently) when people truly expected to receive something in exchange for nothing - i.e. in return for zero efforts invested.
So what is happening now is a direct consequence of the naïveté that brought us to this point. What I mean is that there is no use wanting to go back to where we were before - even if we could, it would only happen again, directly and inevitably. It’s like wanting to go back to being able to smoke again, after receiving a lung cancer diagnosis. Sure things seemed nice, on the surface, but the seeds were being continually sown for our ultimate destruction, on a daily basis as we continued our risky behaviors, either oblivious to or in outright defiance of the knowledge of what lay ahead of us.
Until we learn from our mistakes that is, as simply repeating the same behaviors would not yield a different outcome.
But yes, we may well and properly mourn our loss of innocence - that’s a good thing.
In fairness, in the USA it was the democratically elected people’s Congress that broke long before people started turning towards wanting more authoritarian control.
We can’t have nice things if we don’t keep them up, maintaining them properly.
Even in ye olden days there was never a time (before recently) when people truly expected to receive something in exchange for nothing - i.e. in return for zero efforts invested.
So what is happening now is a direct consequence of the naïveté that brought us to this point. What I mean is that there is no use wanting to go back to where we were before - even if we could, it would only happen again, directly and inevitably. It’s like wanting to go back to being able to smoke again, after receiving a lung cancer diagnosis. Sure things seemed nice, on the surface, but the seeds were being continually sown for our ultimate destruction, on a daily basis as we continued our risky behaviors, either oblivious to or in outright defiance of the knowledge of what lay ahead of us.
Until we learn from our mistakes that is, as simply repeating the same behaviors would not yield a different outcome.
But yes, we may well and properly mourn our loss of innocence - that’s a good thing.
- Edna St. Vincent Millay