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The history books in my school said America was the embodiment of the democratic ideal. They said America and democracy made the world a better place. Maybe they did; I wasn’t there to see how things were before, so it’s possible. I believed it, at any rate, along with everybody else. But that was then.

Now America and democracy are both gone, and asking whether they were better than the tyrants they replaced seems like asking whether a broken leg is preferable to a broken arm. I’d like neither one, thank you very much.

The word “elections”, as we know, was music to the ears of people living under the old-fashioned tyrants, and they were so enchanted at the idea of selecting their own bosses that they didn’t notice how democracy would be just another link in a many-thousands-of-years-long chain of coercion and violence.

Ah, hindsight! Now it seems obvious that violence always begets only more violence, and we know that authoritarian systems, no matter how well-intentioned they may be at the start, always morph into mafias. Maybe most importantly, we know that when an animal begins to eat its tail it will surely die.

People have told me it’s best to let the past go … forget about it and move on. But move on to what? There’s something in the human psyche that craves the quick fix … and that’s the seed from which authoritarian systems grow. I think it’s important that the demise of both democracy and America be documented, lest future generations be lured into repeating the mistakes that brought them about.

The end … the looting, the gangs, the local warlords … it was horrific. Those of us who lived through it still have it burning in our minds. Less clear are the exact events that precipitated the collapse. The Federal Reserve could have stopped it if they’d acted in time, some say, but others say no, the roots go back at least to the Great Recession of ’08. By the time things started unraveling it was too late. They say the damage had already been done from the dumping of trillions of unearned dollars into the world economy.

It’s a favorite topic among the coffeehouse crowd, but when you start discussing it you’ll find two things that nobody disputes: to the average Joe it came out of nowhere, and it was unstoppable as a hurricane once it got going.

People say I was the key to getting us through the Dark Days, but it wasn’t me, it wasn’t any one person. It was all the right people in all the right places at all the right times. If anything that needed to happen hadn’t, if the people who needed to be where they were had been somewhere else, it would have all been different. It reminds me of that little verse:

However unlikely a thing may be,

Once it happens, it’s a certainty.

Or, to put it another way: you never know.

If you lived through it like I did, you know about the despair. They say preachers were claiming the world had ended, and a magical man was about to appear in the sky. But, as usual, he didn’t. Instead, I got hooked up with some really fine people, we started over with a whole new self-government solution, and now we have the peaceful, prosperous post-democratic world everybody takes for granted.

This is my story of how it happened.

 Don

 [Editor’s note: Because of the wry, sometimes emotional and often amusing way Don tells his story, we found it to be a hard-to-put-down personal history of a very difficult time. That said, it doesn’t in itself foster an appreciation of the complex interplay of events leading to the colossal change in the global political landscape of the 21st century. To round it out we have chosen other stories, some perhaps seeming at first to be unrelated, and have woven them into the fabric of his narrative.]