An American tragedy
by Miguel Antonio Bernal
The political tsunami that began with the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States has just begun to be felt within and outside of that northern country.
And that’s not the least of it. US society, and with it, international society, has come to a decisive crossroads for the immediate present and the medium-term future. We’re not dealing with “one more election” nor of an experienced character in the field of politics. We behold the personified first result of a social movement that has been coming at different latitudes, which reveals a deep discontent, dissatisfaction, disappointment and weariness, to different degrees from different socio-economic sectors of society, which is now globalized.
David Remnick, in an article in The New Yorker entitled American Tragedy, wrote that: “The election of Donald Trump to the Presidency is nothing less than a tragedy for the American republic, a tragedy for the Constitution, and a triumph for the forces, at home and abroad, of nativism, authoritarianism, misogyny, and racism. … a sickening event in the history of the United States and liberal democracy. … It is impossible to react to this moment with anything less than revulsion and profound anxiety. … Trump is vulgarity unbounded”
Oscar Arias, the Costa Rican Nobel Peace Prize laureate, say no less when he states that: “I think that the American electorate elected … the most ignorant, uncultured and mendacious of the presidential candidates of recent times. There hasn’t been anyone who aspired to the White House in the US political arena who is so impulsive, temperamental, racist, xenophobic, misogynist and capable of using political power to do damage.”
Here in Panama, we had to live five years of government whose main character does not have to envy Trump, perhaps we should have taken more seriously what is coming to the United States of America and the rest of the world. “God take us having confessed …”
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