The Fourth and our future: This holiday, a look at our increasingly dysfunctional country
from the Detroit Metro Times:
The Fourth and our future
This holiday, a look at our increasingly dysfunctional country
By Jack Lessenberry
Published: July 3, 2012
The other day, thinking about the state of the country, and the state of our own state, a ghastly image came into my mind from William Manchester's book, The Death of a President, about the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
In an especially riveting scene, the stricken president is in the hospital's trauma room, all the best machinery hooked up, the best doctors heroically massaging his chest, doing an emergency tracheotomy, pumping new blood into his veins.
"Everything Parkland had was going for Kennedy now ... (but) it wasn't working," the author related. Nothing could be done; JFK was beyond hope. That was, for those of us who were young then and are old enough to remember now, our defining traumatic news event.
A half-century later, I had been starting to wonder if it was, in fact, finally too late for our system. None of the so-called Founding Fathers, by the way, expected that what they created would have lasted this long. James Madison once said he thought the Constitution might endure for a little more than a century, but most of the rest expected more revolutions to come, probably in a few decades. ....................(more)
The complete piece is at: http://metrotimes.com/columns/the-fourth-and-our-future-1.1338650
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