Except for a few years, and despite being a third-generation United States-born citizen, I have never felt affection for the American government.
By the time I was six, I understood that the United States was not a country that embraced Mexicans, no matter where we were born. At that age, it was by design that we did not have careers comparable to our white compatriots. Assessing my world, I concluded Mexicans were consigned to non-prestigious manual labor or low-end retail workers, the folks who waited on restaurant customers, or labored in the construction industry.
I appreciated the many opportunities to carve out a job that would be decorous and respectable. Now that I am 75, I am still thankful for the hard-fought chances to make something of myself.
The American government opened the door just a crack to earn college degrees and gave me a fighting chance to get a foothold in a career that guaranteed my family and me middle-class lives. Significantly, this included a shot at getting my children into top-tier universities.
My grandparents’ and parents’ haunting accounts of pathological racism seeded the alienation. The estrangement was greatly augmented by my own struggles to cope with blatant and insidious institutional racism.
Yet, I did not move to another country because none were accessible to me. Even as an ethnic Mexican, I had no close familial ties to my ancestral homeland, essentially putting citizenship out of reach.
Despite all that I have just written, I found security and a degree of comfort in my country. It was famously and justifiably known as a nation of laws. The three branches of power, checks and balances, guaranteed that the United States would not descend into dictatorial rule. That was the fate of the world’s poor nations that had never known democracy.
I saw it routinely tested and brutally tried during Watergate and the Iran-Contra scandal. The executive branch went rogue, but it was thwarted and more or less returned to its proper role. Supreme Court rulings instantly became the law of the land.
Before the Trump ascendancy, there were only ten times that presidents either openly disagreed with rulings, ignored, or defied them. The president has openly defied 57 federal court rulings.
Moreover, he has routinely overreached his executive authority. Just in the first six months of his presidency, Trump has shattered modern history records by issuing more than 280 executive orders and proclamations. Those have been answered by approximately 300 lawsuits. Often, those are of no consequence because he will appeal to the rubber-stamp Supreme Court.
Congress is another rubber-stamp body, with Republicans morphed into Trump cultists.
We have an outright tyrant on the rise, and there is nothing in sight to check him. Anti-Trump protests are little more than political theater. He and his acolytes are winning the struggle to quash the Epstein files.
If I stick around long enough, I probably will live under a dictatorship.
French philosopher Joseph de Maistre originated the phrase “every country gets the government it deserves.” At this historical juncture, I’m unsure if that is true.
Ricardo Chavira Chicano 