America Has Fallen

America has fallen.

Or at least the America we thought existed.

But the important word in that last sentence is "thought", because that America never was real, not for anyone.

Today, right now, the Left and the Right are locked in a battle for hearts and minds and votes, and both sides claim they are fighting for the very soul of our nation.

And both sides are wrong.

To understand the problem, we have to go back, all the way to the founding of of the country itself. We have to understand where the gap began.

This is over-simplified but you'll get the idea.

The framers of the Constitution were educated, intelligent, and, in general, of good intent. They wanted to build a country where life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness were indeed possible.

But that is our first problem.

They were all wealthy or at least solvent. They were white. They were male. They were land owners. They were Christian, Atheist, or Agnostic. Some were Trinitarian, others Unitarian or Universalist.

And they were children of their age.

They saw the world through a particular set of lenses.

In their time, men were the head of the family, and women were expected to do as they were told by father or husband or brother.

White people were the only "real" people; everyone else was either an animal or a noble savage with almost no in-between. People of color who proved their intelligence and skill were treated as exotic rarities, all other people of color were treated as zoo exhibits, slaves, servants, or cannon fodder.

Handicapped people were treated as children, or furniture. The mentally ill were a shame to be hidden. While LGBTQ people existed, the idea of their needing to be recognized in any way would have been met with blank incomprehension.

The problem is that when "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness" were discussed, there was a base assumption that the rest of the sentence didn't need to be spoken, and the rest would have been "for everyone white, male, over 18, and a land-holder, who happens not to have any mental illness, physical handicap beyond a certain level, and religion other than Christianity or humanism/enlightened atheism."

But they didn't write that. They couldn't imagine needing to.

When they wrote about the right to bear arms, they looked around and saw a world where almost every man and some women grew up holding a gun. Where guns were essential for survival.

In their world it was laughable that a man might not know how to shoot a gun; that would be like saying today that someone had never touched a television, or bought things at a store.

And the trained militias were essential if England attacked; they could not afford to keep a huge standing army. Men needed to go home and plow and plant.

They were trying to protect their citizens from armed invasion by an occupying foreign power, one which had already demonstrated that it preferred to remove access to weapons from countries it colonized.

They were keeping guns in the hands of trained men, not giving them to an untrained population.

And religion? Freedom of religion? That was designed so that no one could be told how to be a Christian. No one could be forced to go to a church they didn't want to attend.

There was no concept that one day there would be mosques and Buddhist temples in the United States of America. The most they could conceptualize was a man who didn't like the local preacher, or who was a naturalist or an atheist.

So they didn't write that either. They didn't make the USA a Christian nation because they couldn't imagine a world where other religions actually were present enough to require consideration at all.

The right to protest? That was intended so that educated men could argue with a despotic king or president. In a world with limited wide-spread communication, they could not conceive of poorly educated people somehow finding out about obscure points of law or process and wanting to complain. They could not conceive of "the poor" telling the landed class what to do. Protest was for them, the landowning white men, to stand up for their rights.

So they didn't write more specific boundaries on it either.

And the free press? In a world where paper was expensive and a horse could only pull so much?

Right. You had better be sure it stayed free, otherwise no one could tell you that the British had landed again, or sway the opinions of the populace toward whatever the aristocracy thought they needed to believe.

But here we are in 2018. And we still have the same set of governing documents.

The Right believe in much that the original framers would probably agree with, but which they did not put in the actual documents. The Left believe in the words as written in the actual documents, without understanding that the whole society has always leaned more toward the "understood" bits which were left out.

And the fight goes on and on and on.

What the framers wrote, and how they envisioned it working, is not today's vision of a world in right relation. Women, People of color, handicapped people, LGBTQ people, people who are not neurotypical, anyone but white monied males in fact- none of these were considered or even considered for consideration by the writers of  our foundational document.

America has fallen to her knees, because it was never possible to survive this long under a Constitution written in 1775 or 1776.

Today, legally:

• States are gerrymandered until votes no longer matter.
• Schools are underfunded and only the wealthy are learning.
• College debt is crushing, and college no longer accessible for most.
• Water is undrinkable in major urban areas.
• Eight rich people, six of them American, own as much wealth as 50% of the entire human race.
• The President is partisan, and sides with a foreign power against his own people.
• The press is accused of lying when they print verified truths, and threatened by the state when they ask questions
• Megachurch pastors demand private jets, and hide behind tax-exempt statutes as they build mansions and tell the poor that God wants them to send their rent money to the church
• Corporations are considered people.
• Money is considered "speech."
• Prisons are privatized and while the USA is only 4.4% of the world's population, we now hold 22% of the world's prisoners. We have continued slavery by another name, arresting and holding people of color for crimes where we routinely release white people with fines
• 60% of bankruptcies are caused by medical bills
• Children are being stolen from immigrant asylum seekers and released into a for-profit adoption system. Other children are being held in concentration camps with no plan for reunification with parents who have been deported.
• People openly voice beliefs that the earth is flat, science is fake news, vaccines cause autism, the earth is only 6,000 years old. Politicians have openly said they don't know why a woman can't just "hold" her period until she gets home, and claimed that a body can stop pregnancy from a "legitimate rape."

Idiocy has become a point of view. Racism a position to consider. People die or become homeless from lack of medical care.Teachers are on food stamps while the Secretary of Education has nine family yachts, plus her own personal $40 million dollar yacht which sails under the flag of the Cayman Islands for tax purposes, of course.

The government is corrupt and broken; overwhelmed by rampant cronyism and profiteering at almost every level.

Thomas Jefferson said:

"Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established, should not be changed for light and transient causes; and, accordingly, all experience [has] shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But, when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce [the people] under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security."

He also said, "Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God."

We cannot wait, still and silent, as our country falls farther and farther behind.

In 2018's World Happiness Report, Norway ranked No. 1 for happiness, the U.S. was No. 14. In a LexisNexis study of success in securing measures of life, liberty and happiness for their citizens, Norway was also No. 1, while the US ranked 19th, behind the Czech Republic, Japan and France.

In education rankings for developed nations, we are 40 of 72 in mathematics, 25 of 72 in science, 24 of 72 in reading.

We are sick, poor, over-worked and under-educated. We cannot access healthy food at reasonable prices. We cannot house our people. We do not pay a living wage.  We have the world's largest military, our police forces are becoming militarized, we have guns in our streets and shootings in schools and churches and festivals and stores.

The law has been sold. The government is for sale.

Money talks and bullshit walks and there isn't a thing we can do as it is because the corporations are people and money is their speech and...

Enough.

Say enough.

Because it is time to get up off of our knees.

It is time to recreate our country, with all parties seated equally at the table and with liberation centered in the place of white masculinity.

It is time to do this by any means necessary because you cannot dismantle the master's house with the master's tools and the same people who watch as black people die in the streets are not going to let go of the reins of power without a little shove.

I am saying the word and I am saying it loudly.

Revolution.
Revolution.
Revolution.

And this time the revolution will be televised, for everyone to see, and so you need to decide how quickly you will rise.

Because there are no bystanders in a combat zone.


Life. Liberty. The pursuit of happiness.
For all of us this time.

Join the revolution.