Are you happy Obama won the election 2012?

No. For the first time I cried when the results didn't go as I'd hoped. I don’t cry for myself as much as for the country. The results reminded me of a classic book I read just two years ago: Democracy in America by Alexis De Tocqueville. The author is a young Frenchman sent here by the French government to observe and write about America around 1830, just 50 years or so after we'd won our independence. By that time, we’d already made a pretty big splash on the world’s stage. He wrote about the attributes of our country which he concluded would catapult us to superpower status, including the physical ones (location on the globe, natural resources, etc), but also how our government is organized (for example, our divided sovereignty rather than a highly-centralized government as in a monarchy). But he also wrote about the ways in which a democracy brings about its own demise. In a democracy with universal suffrage, people tend to vote for politicians who will “give” them things. These things have a cost. Eventually, in the process of fulfilling their promises so they can stay in office, the politicians drain the public coffers. The people then vote to raise taxes from which they themselves are exempt. Sound familiar? Over many years, the standard of living decreases for everyone, the nation loses power and influence, and eventually ceases to exist as a superpower, or worse, ceases to exist at all. He states that one has only to look to civilizations of antiquity to see this played out over and over again. My heart is broken with the realization that we are likely on that downward trajectory and that as a nation we no longer have the political will to turn the ship around.