America greets our 250th birthday not as the last, best hope of Earth, but under a noxious cloud of broken promises, betrayed ideals, hateful discourse, public corruption, and petulant, petty public leaders peddling horrendous lies without shame.
A great bulk of everyday people are sinking in a quicksand of endless struggles, feeling desperate, helpless, hopeless, while our feckless, egomaniacal, careless, reckless ruling class showers itself in gaudy, self-obsessed, look-at-me excess.
The most vile aspects of our national character and the worst of the American stereotypes crash around our public space chewing up people’s lives and hawking them into the spittoon of our collective historical shame:
Loud, loudly wrong, ignorant, excessive, might-makes-right, cruelty, armed-to-the-teeth, strutting and striding, bullying, and oh-so-tough.
Oh, so weak.
So very very weak.
So insecure, and so obviously so insecure.
Deluded like children playing at action heroes in their movie-minds, with no care or concept of the depth and breadth and complexity of actual human life in the very real world.
Except children have the capacity for growth and wonder and curiosity impossible for these calcified so-called adults running the country.
The callous selfishness of, Greed-is-good and I’m-gonna-get-mine-so-who-cares-about-anybody-else.
The cowardly myopia of, It-doesn’t-affect-me-so-what-do-I-care.
The chilling ignorance, lack of empathy, lack of humanity, lack of compassion, and lack of historical comprehension spewed in the eternal American sins of continued shameless racism and discrimination being enacted once again as a matter of brutal public policy.
And they think they’re being clever.
They especially think they’re being clever when the courts that they’ve vandalized, radicalized, and politicized officially excuse their atrocious behavior.
This time the pathetic fools declaim, Racism-is-actually-over-it’s-reverse-racism-that’s-the-problem, as they follow the timeless playbook.
And this debased ignorance becomes sanctified in the decisions of the nation’s highest court, to roll back civil rights, voting rights, human rights.
The sick, fetishized cruelty of, Good-I’m-glad-those-people-are-being-hurt-they-deserve-it.
The stone-cold pathological depravity of, Empathy-and-compassion-are-actually-bad-things.
America faces our anniversary as the world’s oldest democracy not as a celebration but a reckoning.
We must now take stock of our situation and decide whether we shall snuff out the remaining embers of our constitutional republic in sacrifice to the egomania and moral rot of the age.
A free people may vote their way out of freedom; that is a free choice, but it is also a robbery of future generations who would never then have any such choice.
This betrayal of future generations steals their birthright, the “apple of gold,” as Abraham Lincoln called it, the “political religion of our nation” enshrined in the ideals of the Declaration of Independence, and never yet fully realized, now being betrayed once again.
Consider the second sentence of the Declaration of Independence in full.
In full is key.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident…”
It begins with our fundamental equality as human beings — and therefore deserving of the same exact natural rights and dignity no matter who we are, all of us included, nobody left out, all of humanity.
The second sentence does not end at the individualistic “pursuit of happiness,” a common mistake.
It ends much later, not on the note of individualism in the introductory clause, but on the collectivism, collective interest, and supremacy of the people over the government found in its concluding lines.
Because all of this — all of our government, everything you see — is meant to be for the safety and happiness of the people, all the people. Full stop.
That’s so far from reality right now it’s a joke, and that’s where we’ve gone so catastrophically wrong.
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.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, —That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
The introduction about the individual under the laws of nature is an extension of Lockean thought based on Thomas Aquinas based on a synthesis of Augustine of Hippo and Aristotle:
This fundamental idea that we are all, by our nature, indeed born free in nature, in the full bloom of our individual righteousness of diversity, and we only bind ourselves together voluntarily in what Rousseau called the social contract.
The Declaration acknowledges the greater truth of that bond, and its basis in both our individual natural rights and our free choice of social contract, by proclaiming that all governmental power is derived “from the consent of the governed.”
This is the contract for our collective good, where we recognize that our own narrow self-interest must have limitations to protect the interests of others and our collective interests now and into the future — even and perhaps especially for our ideological opposites — because that’s how we ensure the protection of ourselves, and aspire to liberty and justice for all.
Moreover, “whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends” — destructive of the people’s natural rights to life and liberty, meant to be secured in the bond of self-government — the people further reserve the right of supremacy over our government to do as we wish to effect our collective safety and happiness.
Put simply, all power is inherent in the people and politicians are nothing but public servants. Do not worship them, ever. They are your employees, nothing more. Hold them accountable, relentlessly.
And if politicians are only serving themselves, if they are only serving their own greed and lust for power and the moneyed elites who plunder and profiteer, and they sacrifice the public good at the altar of power and greed and ego, then they have betrayed the public trust and they are of no use to our self-government in their positions.
Past Americans spilled their blood for the rule of law now being ignored.
Past patriots gave their lives for the freedoms, liberty, and protections now being betrayed.
The birthright of future generations is at stake.
We can continue on in a hateful mess of chaos and destruction, or we can heal and build together.
That decision is before each and every one of us right now, and every day.
Ohio Capital Journal is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Ohio Capital Journal maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor David Dewitt for questions: info@ohiocapitaljournal.com.