OPINION | America’s dangerous disease

Credit: Alex Wong/Getty Images Editor’s Note: Jorge Dávila Miguel has a degree in Journalism since 1973 and has maintained a continuous career in his profession to date. He has postgraduate degrees in Social Information Sciences and Social Media, as well as postgraduate studies in International Relations, Political Economy and Latin American History. Dávila Miguel is a columnist for El Nuevo Herald on the McClatchy network, and a political analyst and columnist for CNN en Español. The comments expressed in this column belong exclusively to the author. See more at cnne.com/opinion (CNN Spanish) — A country, a great nation, suffers from a malaise that bleeds it dry. It is not killed by a war, an epidemic or a bankruptcy. A simple but terrible dispute is killing him, although he continues to shine in Hollywood, on the stock market and in international leadership.

It is a single fight, although with nine heads —like the Hydra of Lerna— the one that radically divides this country. I could list each head with its name and its particular ferocity, but there is no time now, nor serenity for that matter. It could further sour the confusion between the two opposing parties, who fight, or believe they fight (which is the same in this world where the opinion about something matters almost more than the something itself) exactly the same for equality, freedom and pursuit of happiness, the three most highly regarded ornaments on the American constitutional tree. They fight so hard, fiercely and faithfully to their principles that every day, one half of that nation is more willing to finish off the other. Yes, let’s admit it: eliminate it, disappear from the face of this same land where everyone was born and in which everyone has the same right to exist, at least legally, and which has been a champion of progress, freedom and tolerance, hard achieved in the 246 years of its history. At this time there is no difference of opinion in a civilized debate; the cheapest language prevails, the sanguine temperament against everything the other says. Biased news, “opinionated” news, those that do not tell everything or those that tell it from a single perspective, abound in the press. I wonder if it could be that, in the absence of real, big problems in the United States, a powerful little machine of mortification begins to walk by itself in some mysterious place, spoiling our lives -so short it is- and inciting us to a merciless combat against the other. Take a look at yourself now. Take a moment and notice that you probably don’t agree with what this writer is saying. He was surely very bothered by the little mortifying machine… “Why is this guy (me) throwing the thing away as a joke? Doesn’t he realize that we are losing democracy? And he autopicas with this internal reflection: “That he equates us with those ‘right wing fascists’! “Let us equate us with those ‘communist leftists’!” “We must get tough because if we don’t, they are going to destroy this country!” Say both sides at the same time. And it’s true, but they’re going to destroy it between the two of them. And so it will be, what a pity. It seems to me —and excuse me, Democrat or Republican, Trump or Biden reader, I don’t want to offend you— that they remind me of the short heels and the high heels of Jonathan Swift in “Gulliver’s Travels”. Always interested in a polemic to the death over unimportant things (that’s one of the nine heads of the Lernaean Hydra and it’s called Trifle) while the house where they both live shakes, divided by their anger. A House Divided Many, before Abraham Lincoln, mentioned the tremendous danger of a “house divided.” From the New Testament in Luke and Matthew and ending in several authors and politicians, it finally falls back on Lincoln’s speech of 1858 with the same name, and its message, due to the crude political and social situation that the US was going through, is coined as a fundamental signal for the course of the road: “A house divided against itself cannot stand. I don’t think this government can permanently cope with being half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to dissolve. I don’t expect the house to collapse, but I do hope it stops being divided,” he said. Today in the United States, what institution is respected? Which is considered free from the partisan political perspective, generally feverish with intransigence? The presidency, Congress, the CDC, the FDA. The Supreme Court? That third constitutional power that once meant the alpha and omega, guarantor of justice? Now it is not supreme, but “republican”. The Constitution itself is the subject of controversy, between those who want to reform it, through its interpretation, and those who want to keep it intact. Where are the common, simple, evident and positive values ​​for the maintenance of social peace hidden —and surely terrified, since they are like little people who inhabit the human being when he is not angry? Lincoln’s words could not stop the bloodiest confrontation in US history. The Civil War cost between 620,000 and 850,000 lives. It is insistently said that there has never been such a polarized situation in this nation as the one we are now witnessing, similar to that of 1858-1861. There are reasons to doubt that another civil war will occur in this country. The rivals are not separated by north-south geography, they are even neighbors; there is an army that respects the Constitution. In which interpretation? Because if experience teaches us anything, it is that the path to the worst can also be infinite.