I am departing from my usual themes to share my thoughts on the state of the Union this morning as we near the end of a very tough year. I return to birds and persimmons, butterflies and chestnuts next week.

All Things Must Pass

(But I would like to wait a while.)

There is no denying 2016 has been a tough year. Week after week this year, headlines announced the deaths of our great artists from the too-young Prince and David Bowie to the gracefully aged Leonard Cohen. We discovered that unsafe levels of lead in our drinking water were being ignored by government officials in Michigan. Our primary elections descended in one party into playground insults, in the other party into chicanery. It seemed like every week another black man was shot by police. Zika virus ran rampant. Syria fell apart. Insurance rates under Obamacare began to skyrocket. In Nice, 87 people were killed when a cargo truck plowed into a crowd. And in Orlando, 49 people were killed while dancing, just for being who they were. The year I turn 49 has been the worst year in my memory, and I am ready to see it end.

As terrible as all the aforementioned events of the year were, there is something else that happened in 2016 that might been seen, eventually, as the greatest calamity of this deplorable trip around the sun. If a pattern that started this year continues, 2016 just might go down in history as the year democracy in America began showing clear symptoms of its death.

In North Carolina, barring some radical intervention, democracy is already dead. The North Carolina legislature, in an emergency session (because, to one party in NC, not having  absolute power is an emergency) has stripped an opposition governor of authority, and ensured their party’s domination far into the future. That is not democracy.

While NC was changing the rules of their game, the US Senate was refusing to perform its constitutionally mandated duty in 2016 by refusing to consider a Supreme Court nominee. That is not democracy.

I am very disappointed in President Obama for not ceaselessly fighting the Senate at full volume, then at least attempting to seat a justice without the their approval had they not acquiesced, and I suspect that history will eventually view him as milquetoast when the Union needed a bull. In North Carolina, at least some people turned out to protest, and a few were arrested, but that all ten million North Carolinians were not in the streets of Raleigh protesting suggests that they are not fully aware of the precedent being set by their representatives’ actions.

Following the throwing of our political and military weight at the Soviet Communists for their one-party rule over decades, and at Saddam Hussein for receiving 100% of the vote in his re-election, one might think the United States would be the last bastion against threats to functioning democracy. It is, after all, what we have held up as our standard for two-hundred forty years. But I am afraid 2016 might mark the end of any legitimacy for the US as standard bearer of democratic rule.

In that they serve to create a single ruling party, the legislative actions in North Carolina and Washington D.C. are no different, in effect, than those performed by the Ba’aths in Iraq, or the Communists in the Soviet Union. We did not see jailing, torture, and execution of dissidents in the United States in 2016, and I am not saying that the NC and DC representatives are as bad as Ba’aths, but the brazen acts of these two bodies could easily have been taken straight from Ba’ath and Communist playbooks.

Eight years ago, when then candidate Obama used “lipstick on a pig” to describe his opponent, the analogy was rightly deemed offensive, as he seemed to be calling his opponent’s female running mate a pig. President Obama would have been well-served to save his analogy for 2016. In this case it would have been perfectly applicable, and I don’t think many of us would find “pig” to be offensive when applied to our representatives. When we do not act like a democracy, we are not a democracy, no matter what we call ourselves. We can cast all the votes we want, but if the people we elect to represent us choose to serve party over constituency, they are as illegitimate as the Communists and the Ba’aths, and we, as citizens of this once-great nation, no longer live in a democracy.

If there is any good news in this worst news of the worst year in memory, it is that we do not all live in North Carolina. For those of us who do not reside in that most beautiful of southern states, perhaps there is still time. The crooks who are drawing the lines and rewriting (or simply ignoring) the rules get their power from voters, from us. If we care enough about the future of this great American experiment, we can replace our representatives, and in doing so, let them know loud and clear why we are doing it. If we do not, we have only ourselves to blame when democracy comes to an end in this land.

Following the successes of the US Senate and North Carolina majorities in defying the constitution and denying voters’ representation, Americans will see more of these attempts to take away all meaning from our votes. You can be sure that these events are being studied, and plans are being drawn. So the question is, how will we respond? Will we follow in the footsteps of the president by saying our piece then sitting down and allowing the trampling of the constitution? Will be be like North Carolinians and stay home while our governorships are stripped of authority? Or will we speak loudly and long, will we take to the streets, and most importantly, will we vote to replace those who do not represent us? All things will pass, but I sure would like to see democracy in America pass on someone else’s watch.