‘I don't think America made it to its 250th birthday'
A thoughtful panel discussion on this day in history by the Byline Times team on the sorrow of what we've lost and on an America that still could be
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If you read my elegy yesterday, you already know my sorrow.
When I got the invitation to speak on a panel for the Byline Times podcast about The State of America: Happy Birthday USA, I didn’t think I could do it. I was on my way to tour a cathedral, and I was also feeling melancholy.
Byline co-founder Peter Jukes called me and said, “C’mon…”
So, I found an alley in Oxford, where I was on a visit to Christ Church. I grabbed WiFi from the Love Cafe, and joined my colleagues, host Adrian Goldberg, Peter Jukes, writer Alexandra Hall Hall, a former British diplomat who is now a US citizen, and Scott Lucas, a professor of international politics at the Clinton Institute, at UCD Dublin, who is from the American south.
When it was my turn to speak, I spoke from the heart:
Well, I’ve been in mourning for a year and a half and off and on for about a decade, but I don’t think America made it to its 250th birthday. I think it stalled out somewhere around 248. So I’m not celebrating.
I’m in mourning. We’ve never seen anything happen to this degree where methodically and systematically institutions are being captured and demolished and people are put in places of power to make Americans sicker, to take away things that were so basic. And when I see people in Texas getting 50-year sentences because they oppose ICE, I know that something’s gone very wrong with our country.
And I don’t see an easy way out of it. There is tech surveillance, as you know, going on. People are living within a kind of a walled prison of tech and tech surveillance.
And people like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel are all, of course, part of this. But the people that Trump has put into positions of power are profiting so much, completely destroying the institutions that I grew up with. I do not recognize America.
I do look forward to, in some future, being able to perhaps celebrate the 250th anniversary. But I don’t believe it’s here. I think the last time we saw a country destroyed as quickly as America is being destroyed, it took a foreign invasion and a lot of allies to get the country back in a direction that was humane.
When Adrian asked me my birthday wish, you guys already know the answer:
To see Vladmir Putin and Donald Trump face a Special Tribunal for crimes against humanity.
I’ll bust out the sparklers on that day.
Have a listen to this thoughtful, wide-ranging conversation filled with both sorrow and reflections on an America that still could be.
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Begin each day with a grateful heart.
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What happened to our liberal democracy! We have become an unrecognizable country, thank you for helping keep the faith!