My wife and I have been considering our coming election, our democracy, and what a failure would mean to us.

In 1968, my former wife and I, both being school teachers, were displeased with how education in Washington State was funded. It was always one levy failure away from chaos. We considered moving to Canada but ended on a tree farm with a house planned only fifty feet from the Canadian border.

In 1972, another levy failure, and our district considered cutting teachers’ salaries in half in order to keep all the staff. Instead, they pushed all classes to over 42 students K through 12. We decided to leave. We considered Canada, along with Australia and New Zealand. We had offers from them, but decided to join the State Department Schools.

We moved to nations such as Tunisia, Brazil, Pakistan, Liberia, etc. In this thirteen year odyssey of visiting overland or living in more than 100 countries, we were exposed to their governments and politics. We eventually both moved back to the United States to settle for what I believed would be the last move. My second wife and I settled on a horse farm near Enumclaw. Neither my former wife nor I found a nation we preferred to live in.

What is important is that my wife and I are now considering moving, this time to Canada or Norway. My wife prefers Norway, I am not sure if New Zealand or Australia might be a better choice. If Donald Trump wins the November election and then proceeds to dismantle our Democracy, it will be time to move to a real democratic nation for security. We would prefer not to be placed in a detention camp for speaking out against his administration and would want to be far away from an autocratic, racist and violent mess.

I believed that this first of the truly democratic nations experiment would last forever. However, maybe nations have a lifetime limit before disintegration. Most nations historically have not failed from disease or famine but from economic disasters, aka bad leadership. Western Rome fell in 476 due to devaluation of its currency and inability to pay its protective legions.

When Benjamin Franklin walked out of the Constitutional Convention, a woman asked him what kind of a government had been created. He replied, “a republic, if you can keep it”. That question may still be, “can we keep it”?

True Democracy has been the next to last form of government to be tried. Communism was the very last tried in 1917, but failed in 1991. Are we losing what Winston Churchill called “the worst form of government, except when compared to all the rest”? In Tolstoy’s novel War and Peace there is a line “Nothing was prepared for the war that everyone expected”.

This is why I am writing this. We need to be prepared to fight politically for our Constitution and our democracy; they are in peril, threatened by a dictatorship from a convicted criminal.

Eugene Clegg

Enumclaw