This nation turns off many people, and a very large segment of society feels trapped. At the same time, many are hopeful to achieve a better life simply because a large number of people have been successful here indeed.
Will you allow me to explain this, using the political setup, John?
The Founding Fathers did look at Europe for examples, and they found Switzerland, Poland and the Netherlands as examples to investigate how to create their United States.
None of these places were good examples for a large nation, but the Founding Fathers used a good trick to pull it off.
So, let me start off with Switzerland and the Netherlands and their political structures of empowerment.
In these small nations, the building blocks in the old days were cities and lands. The larger collectives of cities and lands were called cantons in Switzerland and provinces in the Netherlands.
Then, they had a federation in place among these cantons/provinces.
As such, we find prototypes of Constitutions in these places.
The Founding Fathers learned that if they would put this structure in place, it would never lead to a stable outcome. Meaning, a large nation cannot be built on this hierarchy of cities/lands, cantons/provinces, and (con)federations.
What they ended up putting in place was not a bottom-up hierarchy but a top-down structure. Because they had to avoid empowering units that were too small to build-out a large nation, they simply skipped cities and land.
In the US Constitution, cities and lands are not empowered directly. They got empowered after the US Constitution was put in place by parties that are empowered themselves in the US Constitution.
The Founding Fathers, however, could also not hang this structure in the air, and therefore we have the much quoted words We The People in the US Constitution.
The People are the actual foundation to the United States.
This is quite unique in the world, and it is both the strength and the weakness of this nation. This nation could indeed balloon to a much larger nation, and at the same time it cannot get a communal structure in place that works well for all. It is a nation that hangs in the air, except that it is indeed based on the people.
The people are the grounding force, and unfortunately people do not consider making the lives of 333 million other people their goal in life. They are too busy making their own lives and the lives of their loved ones better.
Agreeing on the overall structure of a good nation was left to the Founding Fathers. No one else can make the overall structure of this nation good. It is therefore with the Founding Fathers that the only path toward a better society for all is found. They left us a pathway and it is time to take it.
There, I think I said it all, John.
Thank you for your good communications.
