As an unprecedented second impeachment trial of Donald Trump gets underway in the U.S. Senate, there is an important question that needs to be answered.
It is a bigger question than whether Senators will vote to convict, is the question about whether a country more politically divided now than in many many decades, will ever be a united people of the United States. President Lincoln was confronted with that question at a time when our country was its most divided in our history, during the Civil War that left hundreds of thousands of Americans dead on both sides.
Today, here in 2021, we are not in a civil war but there is what has been an increasingly uncivil political war that started before Donald Trump but has growing and getting worse for longer than the last few years. How do we end it? Can we end it?
Some advice was offered the other day by a man who has served in some of the most important top posts in the federal government, from White House Chief of Staff to head of the CIA and Defense Secretary and who founded a respected Public Policy institute some years ago.
He is Leon Panetta, a Democrat, but not a far-left Democrat. And someone who has been respected by many Republicans.
When asked what’s needed, Panetta said that unless the two parties learn to work together and not to let the extremists om both sides split us even further apart, we cannot have good government, and we can’t get important things done, and we risk even more Americans losing even more trust in their government. That’s not what our nation’s founders had in mind.
(Photo Getty Images)
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