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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsA Rededication to the United States of America
The United States of America was never a sure thing, and it still isn’t.
A little epiphany for me today, on Veteran’s Day. Actually, not so little: too damned long! But here goes...
240 or so years ago, British colonists in America rebelled against their mother country over an idea. An idea! An idea that had been much talked about but little acted on in that era, which is stated succinctly in our wonderful Declaration of Independance:
“Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed”
(We don’t need no stinkin’ monarchy! We pick our own leaders, dammit!)
At that time, America’s colonials enjoyed perhaps the highest standard of living in the entire world, and British subjects enjoyed political freedom that was unique among citizens of major powers. Benjamin Franklin, no lover of the British monarchy, thought that rebellion was @#$%^ing nuts to give up such a good thing, and it took him quite some time to fully buy into the idea of splitting off. But despite having much to lose, our country’s first army came together and took up arms for the right to turn that idea into practice. There was great hardship and suffering, ambivalence and antagonism from many fellow colonials, but in the end they earned what they asked for.
Today, we thank those brave soldiers and their families for their suffering in the service of creating a noble experiment in government of, by, and for the people.
80 years later, brave Americans were again at war, this time over the question of whether the young country was a country; were we The United States of America, with laws that applied to all inhabitants? Or were we simply a confederation of smaller states that banded together when convenient to each state? Were we one, or many? The proximal cause of this war was the ghastly insistence by some states that man has an unalienable right to own another human being, and to use that human being in whatever manner they wished, and that this terrible practice should expand in contravention of our Constitution.
Would the Constitution hold? There is no more perfect description of that struggle than President Lincoln’s opening address at the dedication of a vast cemetery filled with the dead from one battle in that war. It begins:
“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”
and ends:
“It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us… that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
The noble idea again prevailed, through the blood, sweat, and tears of soldiers under arms, and today we thank them and their families for their suffering in this service.
After another span of about 80 years, our founding principle was again under attack, by oligarchs at home and fascism abroad:
“They had begun to consider the government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs and we know now that a government by organized money is just as bad as a government by organized mob.” – Franklin Delano Roosevelt
Taking back our own government was effected virtually without bloodshed thanks to the revolutionary weapon given to us by our Founders: the vote. We got our act together, voted for good and smart leaders, and government of, by, and for the people was restored.
Our votes won the war.
But the situation abroad was another matter, and Americans again took to arms, in a brutal global struggle against monstrous tyranny. And again, those Americans were successful, and today we thank them and their families for their suffering in this service.
Once again eighty years have passed, and again we find ourselves in a familiar predicament: government of, by, and for the people has been replaced by government of, by, and for organized money. America’s 99%, indeed our planet’s 99%, have become the the food, the pawns, and the playthings of a small group of people, many of them deeply depraved predators, more interested in filling the gaps in their wine collections than in feeding the hungry. They have purchased the majority of those who make and enforce our laws, and have spent vast amounts to divide and weaken the populace so that we have become unable to leash their depredations.
I have been watching our inexorable decline for decades, and it has been frustrating beyond words, so very, very sad. At first I tried to do what I could to stop the slide, but the thing was too large, and it was obvious that my efforts were but a flea fart in a hurricane. So I stopped trying.
And now we spiral the drain.
Month by month, things grow worse for the 99%, better for the 1%. We see the homelessness, the despair. The American Dream is now just a distant dream for most Americans. We once were a great country where each year brought greater prosperity for most, where there were wrongs, but these were righted with time. We are now the Hunger Games, the prey and the preyed-upon.
Sometimes I just want to walk away. To pick up stakes, to take my family and go to another place, to one of the few remaining countries which are organized around the collective good of all of their residents. I’ve thought about this a lot recently: today’s United States of America is no good place for our teenaged son to enter adulthood. Perhaps it’s time to seek better conditions elsewhere, as my ancestors did, and as did their ancestors before them.
But here’s what I realized today, on Veteran’s Day: I am surrounded by people, some alive and some as spirits, who went out there and fought the good fight. Some gave there lives, some returned with grievous wounds to body or mind, and some served at a desk. But they served. They got up off their asses, joined the cause, and they got the job done. It was never a sure thing, but they fought through the uncertainty and got it done.
What kind of a person am I if I quit the fight now? Not much of one!
And so, I will give it another shot. Instead of slinking off, I will try to live up to the ideals of our veterans.
I will fight. I’m not sure of what to do yet, but I will damned well fight.
And I hope that you will fight, too!
It will be tough, but we can win. We must win. We owe this to our posterity, to our future, and to the future of our children.
Excelsior!
----------------------
A little note: I did something dumb and started a blog as an experiment. I'll give it three months and see how it goes. I love DU, but sometimes I worry that the Stark Fist of Removal is in my future, so I'd like to have another record elsewhere.
(Feel free to not check the blog out yet. Almost nothing's on it, and it's ugly.)
Everything I write on it will be freely shareable under the Creative Commons license, and will be marked:
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
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BlueJazz
(25,348 posts)
I think you're off to a good start.
MannyGoldstein
(34,589 posts)I ended up doing a lot of research on health care "stuff" - I hope to write something up sometime. There are lots of facts and figures, but in the end it's not too complicated - our health care stinks, costs a fortune, and is exploited by real monopolies and virtual monopolies.
BlindTiresias
(1,563 posts)"Sometimes I just want to walk away. To pick up stakes, to take my family and go to another place, to one of the few remaining countries which are organized around the collective good of all of their residents. I’ve thought about this a lot recently: today’s United States of America is no good place for our teenaged son to enter adulthood. Perhaps it’s time to seek better conditions elsewhere, as my ancestors did, and as did their ancestors before them.
...
What kind of a person am I if I quit the fight now? Not much of one! "
Lots of people ran away from hopeless situations, including most of our ancestors. Were they lesser people because they decided to not dash themselves against the ramparts? As a nation of immigrants I see no problem in the children of immigrants deciding that moving here was a mistake and the country wasn't all it was cracked up to be.
MannyGoldstein
(34,589 posts)and the connection to the country.
There's no doubt that we're in for bad times, but (on most days) I don't believe it's hopeless.
That being said... we have a close family friend, a Jewish woman born in Köln Germany in the 1920s. Her father was damned lucky - he owned a butcher shop, and was singled out by the Nazis for abuse soon after they took power. He was briefly jailed and beaten on charges that he was slipping poison into the wurst sold to his goyishe customers.
"These people are murderous - I'm moving abroad!" said he.
"Chill... it'll stop soon, everyone in Germany knows these people are crazy and must be stopped" said their relatives, almost all of whom were slaughtered in the camps.
I'm (perhaps wrongly) proud that we used to be a country that was an (imperfect!) beacon for the world, a place where ideas were more important than genetics, at least as compared to other countries.
Perhaps the days of unleashing the better angels of our natures are over. But I think it's worth one good try.
BlindTiresias
(1,563 posts)You get one shot at the kind of change you are talking about, and that was in the 30's. People were pacified by the New Deal while the still very much intact oligarchs went to the work of dismantling the opposition that almost toppled them, and it worked very well. Communists were destroyed, then socialists, and then unionists and now even center-left is considered "too radical". There is no coherent ideology to oppose them anymore, they have essentially corrected the gap in the armor that existed previously and now they have the privilege of globalized capital and automation to really ensure their totalitarian dominion. By all measures beyond the most optimistic it is over.
There is also the rather problematic fact that the very constitution and federalist system could very well be working against anything but a plutocracy, after all, that is what it was designed to be. It was only -after- progressives in the early part of the twentieth century began revising things that we saw a more progressive tone to the government and constitution, and that too is being rolled back. Now that originalism is ascendent and will likely undo the gains made in the 30's-60's. I think you can even expect a more originalist understanding of the commerce clause in the future too, which will really undo things.
newfie11
(8,159 posts)My husband is 80 and I'm 70. I would leave in a heartbeat if he would. It's not going to happen for us and my kids have no desire to leave yet.
The difference is they don't know what we've lost. They we not around in the 50 & 60s. People could make a decent living.
Bookmarked your site and thanks for it.
woo me with science
(32,139 posts)The oligarchs we talk about today are not oligarchs of a country. They are complicit with global corporations, transnational conglomerates.
They are eating up countries, sucking their husks dry, and spitting out the carcasses.
We sit at the core of the malignancy. As long as there is a prayer of stopping them, we need to be trying to do that.
If they aren't stopped, they will eventually expand to wherever you run, or send your children. Maybe not tomorrow, but soon.
BlindTiresias
(1,563 posts)we have no ideology able to resist and many people take delight in the suffering of what they perceive as lesser citizens. I don't know what to tell you if you think any resistance is going to start here, I see no indication of any kind of capability to do so.
It is also ahistorical in that resistance to empire almost never started or was most meaningful at the core.
silverweb
(16,402 posts)[font color="navy" face="Verdana"]Inspiring and motivating. Thanks.
sheshe2
(83,661 posts)He will get military honors there. He served in WW2, he was 21 years old and became the youngest Captain in the Pacific. My dad served proudly.
I weep for his passing.
MannyGoldstein
(34,589 posts)to be a captain at such a young age!
Again, my condolences.
- Manny
OnyxCollie
(9,958 posts)And it's got a great soundtrack.
I give it two thumbs up.
ChisolmTrailDem
(9,463 posts)
defacto7
(13,485 posts)Nice blog start too.
JDPriestly
(57,936 posts)
Unknown Beatle
(2,672 posts)for future reference. Nice to see more independent voices in the blogosphere.
Odin2005
(53,521 posts)
MannyGoldstein
(34,589 posts)I'd noticed the "calamity and rebirth every lifetime" cycle befor reading the book, although obviously they had tons more details.
bvar22
(39,909 posts)Bookmarked your Blog.
DURec.
woo me with science
(32,139 posts)