Can you believe that Donald J. Trump has only been president for a little over two months? Truthfully, even I had to rethink that timeframe as it seems as if his inauguration and presidency has been going on for much longer.
America was created by those who were politically savvy. The Revolutionary War had severed this country from being a colony of Great Britain. Those who came together as part of the Continental Congress had lived under English Common Law. That experience and their subsequent desire for freedom had them first give us the Articles of Confederation, later followed by the Constitution. A comparison between those two documents shows the thought processes that went into each. Especially when one takes into consideration that both documents had pretty much the same people involved.
There is a reason why this country is a republic and not a democracy. In a republic, we have certain inalienable rights which a government can’t take away even if that government were elected by the majority of the people. In a democracy, the majority rules even at the expense of the minority.
One of the things I am seeing since the election of Trump is the involvement by those who previously had very little interest in the political process. Take “involvement” with a grain of salt as that involvement ranges from a lack of knowledge, partial knowledge, or even headline news knowledge. Whichever is the case, people are becoming more involved and even if it is because they don’t like the current president, involvement is where citizens of this nation need to be.
I, for instance, am researching American history with renewed interest. In high school it was a mandatory subject that I took every year during summer school to satisfy my graduation requirements. Now as I watch the political back-and-forth, I can see even more clearly how the history of this country plays a role in where we are and where we are going.
I find myself enjoying news articles that previously were rarely reported on or were hard to find. Reporting standards, because of the internet, are not what they were say 20 years ago. News organizations have changed because of it. People are so wirelessly connected in today’s world, they don’t purchase newspapers. In the meantime, the need to fulfill a voracious appetite for news in a digital world has to be met. Thus we are given stories that have no meat to them. To me, nothing is more frustrating than reading a crime story that doesn’t have details. On the other hand, those same stories are at least being reported on. Thus the tenuous balance between the two sides.
Some of my friends, whom I have met because of social media, are still in a tizzy over Trump as president. They post negative articles about him daily. They also post reminders to tell everyone to pay attention to what Trump is up to as what makes the news is a distraction to take our attention away while other things are snuck through. They are reading the budget and analyzing it, page by page.
No matter whether you love him or hate him, Trump has invigorated Americans to be involved in the political system.
And in so doing, that is helping to keep America great!
