The United States vs. Whatever This Is

De: Ken Schenck

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

Concerned about what is happening in America, I did a sweep through the last 250 years of our history with a view to the present. What I found was that every era of American history is shouting to us, warning us that we are headed in the wrong direction.

The Founding Fathers insisted on a Bill of Rights, which is currently being thrown out the window. People are abducted without warrant or trial to concentration camps. The Founders protested autocracy, yet the current administration has shut down independent checks and balances. We have a rogue Supreme Court throwing century-long precedents in the garbage. The Congress is simply rubber stamping things it knows are horrible.

Freedom of press is slammed as the more objective channels are shut down. Meanwhile, the wall between church and state is increasingly torn down as one particular form of evangelical Christianity is given free reign -- a destruction of the freedom of religion for everyone else. Hard fought advances in civil rights are being thrown out as if white people are the ones who have it hard. There is talk of "all white communities" and even taking away the right for women to vote. These are voices we couldn't have imagined just months ago. In addition, the lessons of the Gilded Age and the Great Depression are ignored, preferring rather the horrible conditions of the late 1800s and 1930s.

In this book, I work backward from the present to the past, unfolding the history we have forgotten or never knew. To this point, we have been able to rely on a system that embodied the built-in insights of the past. But this administration is bulldozing everything, including the Rose Garden. It is unclear if it is too late to stop it. But if we still have time, we desperately need to reverse course now. This book is a plea to return to the Constitution and the United States of America rather than let "whatever this is" continue to destroy us.