Peter D Brown, Author

How did it happen?

It is a question that many asked following the Civil War. The same question was undoubtedly asked by the citizens of Germany in the years leading up to and following World War II. How did it happen?

Now, I fear it is a question we will be asking ourselves in the not-too-distant future. One that we will struggle to answer for our grandchildren someday when they ask what happened to our freedom, our liberty, and our system of justice—for all.

We’ll explain that we once had an ideology built upon a creed that read: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” We’ll tell them that we had a system that we called democracy and that it lasted almost three hundred years. We’ll tell them how we used to have the freedom to write and publish our views, speak our minds, and share our thoughts freely with others without fear of reprisal, and how, when we vehemently disagreed, we had the right to assemble and protest peacefully. We’ll explain how we used to settle our differences with consensus at the ballot box and how we had fair and free elections to select those who would represent our interests. We’ll tell stories about how our fathers and brothers fought and died to defend these freedoms and how a great leader once said, “that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

They’ll listen in wonder as we recount the world as it was, when the powers of government were separated into three distinct branches with checks and balances, all under oath to preserve and protect an agreed-upon set of rules—“in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”

We’ll tell them how it worked so well, until we gave power to an autocratic despot who debauched, derailed, and destroyed it all. And they’ll turn their innocent little faces up to us and ask, “How did it happen?”

What will we tell them?