A Wake Up Call - Is America a Failed State?

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman touches on one of my feelings this sad morning: we have found out that a majority of Americans hold supposed American values in contempt and hold many of their fellow citizens in contempt, if not open hatred.  The husband says I need to stay calm, but I feel that we have begun the journey down a path that parallel's that of Germany in the early 1930's. The full horrors to come are still unclear and off in the distance.  It is definitely time to reconsider who is one's friend and who is either an enemy or a facilitator for hate and bigotry.  Here are column highlights:

What we do know is that people like me, and probably like most readers of The New York Times, truly didn’t understand the country we live in. We thought that our fellow citizens would not, in the end, vote for a candidate so manifestly unqualified for high office, so temperamentally unsound, so scary yet ludicrous.

We thought that the nation, while far from having transcended racial prejudice and misogyny, had become vastly more open and tolerant over time.

We thought that the great majority of Americans valued democratic norms and the rule of law.

It turns out that we were wrong. There turn out to be a huge number of people — white people, living mainly in rural areas — who don’t share at all our idea of what America is about. For them, it is about blood and soil, about traditional patriarchy and racial hierarchy. And there were many other people who might not share those anti-democratic values, but who nonetheless were willing to vote for anyone bearing the Republican label.

I don’t know how we go forward from here. Is America a failed state and society? It looks truly possible.  . . . this has been a night of terrible revelations, and I don’t think it’s self-indulgent to feel quite a lot of despair.

I feel that the America that I thought I knew died yesterday.  Today has a funeral-like feel.  I think I will dress all in black today and mourn the death of American decency.  No longer can we pretend that a majority of Americans are kind and decent people.  Yesterday's election results proved that.  So much for the myth of American exceptionalism.