Well, that's a wrap. The Declaration of Independence has been put to death by sheer force of one power-obsessed personality and careful planning, implemented in front of our backs, in plain sight.
The historical document and its issue, the American Constitution, were written and signed, sooooo nearly 250 years ago, that I want to take this post to honor the memory of this grand experiment, oddly out of sync for its own time and so ideal modern Americans can't even comprehend its seminal truths. It proved unable to withstand the constant assaults upon it and has flipped out on into the past to forever pine for the sort of nostalgia it deserves along with other lost but partially realized ideas, like steam engines, VHS, bench car seats, and silent films.
Each of those also represented a stage toward something else. In most cases, what followed was mostly an improvement but lost something intangible, like simplicity, intuitiveness, or power of metaphor. We, due to our current failures to sustain American Democracy, have lost our collective heart.
Of course that is simplistic and in some ways wrong. The American Experiment was not about moral responsibilty, but about lofty goals held back from realization by restraints of culturally derived privilege. I truly believe the founding fathers intended what they said, in that little-known treatise entitled the "Declaration of Independence" about "all men are created equal"; but they were thinking, of course, about all white men of European descent and more particularly all white men of European descent who had moved to or who had grown up in America. They weren't considering the African slave so often separated from his or her family by forced migration or, literally, anyone non-English-speaking. They weren't thinking about women. When they wrote "all men" it must be remembered that they were writing about "me and all us other dudes."
It doesn't say "all human beings are created equally". But it should. That's what they were thinking; they just didn't have the perceptual range to embrace that the concept. "men" to them, was...them. No apologies or derision are called for; that would be ridiculous. They were what they were, an unevolved race and gender in an unevolved population.
In the 20th and 21st centuries, America extended its perceptual range through cycles of protest, legislation, and judicial judgement. Sure, pronouns and inclusiveness laws sometimes may have seemed overboard, but we were busy awkwardly stretching awarenesses.
Now that's done. Over. People without an evangelical denomination have become, if not invisible, expendable to degrees not seen since that giant stain on history, slavery, spread in its uniquely ugly ways. The stacked SCOTUS (brilliant) and the 269 slobbering greedbuckets in Congress (gerryrigged brilliantly) and the King of the World (abberational)
It's here. People of color are being rounded up in the streets by masked thugs, held in heartless detention facilities, and often "deported" to geolocations near which they have no ties. Experts have been replaced by dangerously inexperienced kiss-ass loyalists. The US national military has been deployed to keep peace in a US city amidst legal and mostly peaceful protests. Watch the posture of Joseph Musselini in old newsreels. Look up to your flatscreen. See it in the shallow man who has become our King.
Google "2025 Mandate for Leadership" and compare its emphatically retrogressive calls for radical "conservative" and repressively religious change. It's scary. It's also happening, piece by piece, horror by horror. Can it be stopped?
I was overseas with my wife and family members when that stupid, wasteful parade featured tumbleweed empty bleachers and whole military units walking casually and unsmilingly instead of marching. This collective passive-agressive statement by rank and file military, and it was a statement, gives one a little heart. The "No Kings" protests give us a little more. History can be used as a hopeful support or a broad set of fear-inducing examples.
Maybe we'll see a reclamation of the Declaration. Or maybe we'll slide into the self-protecting complacency that is just waiting to envelope the ones of us who are left. Oh, Yes, they are coming for Lefties next. You can call yourself an independent, as I do my own self, but you know who you are. So do they, or at least they think they do, in their typically shallow reactional thinking.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not calling for violence (talk about not learning from history). I'm seventy freaking five years old, and climbing up out of a foxhole with a butter knife for a weapon has never been my idea of a good time. But in my own quest for self-care and creativeness, I carry the saturating guilt of inaction. How are you dealing with yours?
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