||| FROM EMILY GEYMAN |||
John Geyman’s new book is focused on a basic question for 2022: ARE WE THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA? Can We Hold Together As One Country?
Increasing diversity, disparities and inequities over recent decades have led to growing polarization within our society. Our two major political parties are more divided than ever with the leadership of one party still believing that the presidential election of 2020 was stolen. Our democracy is under siege, with both majority governance and the rule of law under attack, as demonstrated by the January 6, 2021 armed insurrection at our Capitol. Our sense of community is being held hostage to the outcome of this current battle to uphold our democracy.
The goals of this book:
- 1) to bring historical perspective to trends in the U.S.
- (2) to examine the major forces that have, or are, working toward further decline of our sense of community; and
- (3) to suggest useful approaches to rebuild it locally, regionally and nationally, and to revive the spirit of community and unity as a country.
It is available at Darvill’s Bookstore in Eastsound.
I look forward to reading it! Hopefully the library will have a couple of copies.
My a priori response to the the title of the book is: “nope”.
The federal US government is a huge, unwieldy, generally well-meaning but generally inept bureaucracy. And like all bureaucracies, it now exists primarily to perpetuate itself. It’s absurd to think that bureaucracy can govern a continent wide area containing 330 million increasingly socially diverse people. It’s simply too big to be humanely and effectively governed by any political system.
Semi-autonomous regional governments, with a NATO like shared defense pact, would be a reasonable step-down in complexity and bureaucratic expense that we just might be able to manage without a war of secession being necessary. Let the Pacific States, Texas, the Mountain States, the Heartland and the South each go their own way… people have been sorting themselves regionally for a long time already. Maybe give people 10 years of guaranteed right to immigrate to or from any of the regions and financial assistance for relocation?