After my husband and I retired from our longtime careers we began enrolling in classes at the Rice University Glasscock School of Continuing Education. Each of the offerings have all been superb and have lead us to reading more about certain topics and discussing the impact of the historical evolution of the world.
One of the best series of classes came from a professor of history, Dr. Newell Boyd, who took us through the incredible age of classical Greece, the rise and fall of Russia, and later through the complex story of Great Britain. We were so enthralled by his lectures that we traveled to some of the places in London that are connected to the eventual revolution in the American colonies.
Dr. Boyd knew how to make the past come alive in a manner that kept us wanting to learn more and more. He had a way of connecting the threads of history to the modern world and making sense of who we are as humans and how we got to this place. He also inserted the human aspect of the past in such a way that we felt a connection with our ancestors as we began to better understand what life must have been like for them.
Initially the kings of England were totally in charge. Democracy for the common man was in the distant future. Kings decided when to go to war and how to spend the national treasure. They demanded total obedience from their carefully chosen assistants who generally came from a higher class of people than the peasants whose thoughts on how things should be were rarely considered. Those who refused to bow in allegiance were either tossed aside or condemned to death. We’ve all seen movies like Becket that tell the story of kingly friendships that ended with the death of a man willing to stand up for his beliefs that were counter to what the king desired. Dr. Boyd told us so many stories of souls whose final moments on this earth were decided by the king.
Of course eventually the common citizens of the kingdom demanded more and more rights and the Parliament that was once little more than a group of confederates of the king gained enough power to begin critiquing the actions of a king. Bit by bit they moved toward a more inclusive and democratic form of governing until the present day when the king is a more symbolic than an actual ruler.
I have been thinking of those lessons from Dr. Boyd a great deal lately and somehow I have come to feel that the United States of America which came from a revolution against the king of England is in a stunningly perverse way moving backwards. By that I mean that our president is grabbing so much power that he does not even defer to the duly elected Congress. He uses loopholes and stalling techniques to insinuate his power over issues that were never intended to be his domain. At the same time the Republicans in Congress bow to his every wish much like those wealthy Englishmen who pandered to kings of old. Even the Supreme Court mostly looks the other way when he ignores the Constitution by starting a war that has no end in sight. All the while his cabinet members fawn over him as though he is the greatest genius to ever sit in the Oval office.
To me Donald Trump is the very essence of a long ago king. He burnishes the White House with gold adornments and seems to think that it is his right to redesign the place to meet his personal needs. He posts his name on everything and he tears apart agencies that do not go along with him. He seems to have a kingly complex which is more than ironic in this year of what should have been a celebration of our nation’s freedom from a king.
In just a little over a year and a half he has destroyed so much of what has been good about our nation. Some people compare him to a fascist and there is certainly evidence that he models many of those characteristics but it seems to me that more than anything he wants to be a king. He wants us to bow down to him. He wants to imprison or put to death those who are not totally loyal to him. He is enriching himself and his family while impoverishing the most economically insecure citizens of the nation. He abhors the common folk but showers them with lies and propaganda designed to keep himself and his loyal followers in charge. Nothing that he does has anything to do with enriching our nation. Instead it is all about providing him with immense power, glory and wealth. It is as though he sees himself as a modern day King Henry VIII.
I have visited the Tower of London. I have viewed the family jewels of King Charles. I have seen the rooms where the unfaithful citizens of old were imprisoned. I have stood on the site where many of them were hanged in front of crowds of common folk who understood the message being sent to them. I have seen the location where an earlier King Charles was hung as Parliament began to use its force in the name of the people. I see that nothing is really new again but rather is an echo from the past.
I don’t want our current president to hang but I am in favor of limiting his powers the way they were intended to be by those who so earnestly crafted our Constitution. It is long past time for the people of the United States to insist that we return to three independent branches of government and that the tax money that we send to Washington DC be spent for us, not for the whimsy of one man. It is time to set things right and that will only happen if we join together to send people to Washington who will defy the president when he breaks the laws of our nation. If we don’t do that now I fear what our future will be. As it is there is so much that we must repair to make certain that this never happens again.
All It Takes Is A Little Love 