If Not Us, Who?

I love my country, but I love my children and my planet more. Maybe that’s why it sometimes brings me to tears when I realize that everything good I was ever taught about this nation was either an exaggerated myth or a blatant lie. Most people I meet just accept the way things are and exist in the fog of mindless consumption or cheap entertainment, but I refuse.

I’ve found far too many examples of people who refused to silently tolerate the wrongs they saw around them and against the odds made a difference in the world. The Quakers of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries stood firm against racial slavery until their cause triumphed. Slavery still exists in the world, but not as an accepted economic institution.

Mohandas Gandhi took a stand against injustice and was beaten repeatedly, went to prison numerous times, and nearly starved himself to death to make his point, but the movement he started eventually led to a peaceful overthrow of British rule in India and proved that one person, dedicated and diligent in their cause, can change their world.

Gandhi’s struggle eventually cost him his life, but not before he inspired thousands of others, among them a young American preacher struggling to overturn the wrongs being done to his people, the descendants of African slaves in America. Martin Luther King, Jr. was only one man, but his inspired leadership challenged and rallied others to take up his cause, ultimately resulting in the walls of racial discrimination in this country becoming cracked and broken. Today those walls are still coming down thanks to the ongoing efforts that Dr. King’s work began.

Like Gandhi, Dr. King gave his life to the struggle which he led, but not in vain. Less than fifty years since the civil rights movement he helped establish began, America elected a young man of African ancestry to the presidency of this nation. When Martin King was assassinated in 1967, he had just begun to refocus his goals to encompass social justice for all working people, regardless of race or ethnicity.

The American republic has from its inception been a nation designed and ruled by an elite, wealthy minority. The laws and institutions enacted to benefit and uphold the values of the wealthy are often in conflict with the ideals of democracy and justice; the needs of the working class are often neglected or ignored. Today the richest 1% of our population controls more than 95% of the wealth of this nation, leaving the remainder to be fought over by the other 99% of the people. This results in poverty, hunger, lack of adequate health care, educational inequality, and a host of other social problems which should not exist in a nation such as ours.

We live in the richest nation the world has ever known, yet we adhere with an almost religious fanaticism to an economic system that allows such disparities to not only continue, but to increase. The United States of America has become a backwater of enlightened civilization and a disgrace upon the world stage. Even the Communist Chinese take better care of their people than we do.

What the hell is wrong with us?

We cling to our Constitution, a relic of the eighteenth century, as if it were the last life raft on the Titanic. The oldest manifestation of democracy in the modern world has changed very little in the 220 years since it was first ratified.

We need a new constitutional convention, but the rich and powerful minority finds that prospect utterly terrifying. The economic elites are so frightened of what we, the people, might actually do, that they willingly spend billions of dollars every year spewing lies and hatred from their corporate media machines. The working class is kept so divided against itself that, short of revolution, we stand almost no chance of ever righting our sinking ship of state.

Abortion, gay marriage, immigration, health care, socialism, gun rights, etc., the list of wedge issues used by the elite to keep us in conflict with each other is almost limitless, yet all it would take is for the laboring people of this nation to stop bickering long enough to see through the smoke screen of our corporate masters and realize that WE ARE ALL HUMANS.

It doesn’t matter if you’re black or white, straight or gay, male or female, Muslim, Christian, Atheist, Hindu, Buddhist, or Jew. Nor does it matter one iota if your family came here on the Mayflower or swam the Rio Grande last week. WE ARE ALL JUST PEOPLE!

Wake up and realize what an utter fool you, and your neighbor, and all the rest of us have been in playing along with this game of Divide and Conquer for so long.

This is your wake up call. It’s why I spend so much of my time writing messages and sending them into the void that is cyberspace, looking everywhere for the clues that might lead to a solution, to a better day for our children, grand-children, and their offspring somewhere in the distant future.

I’m no leader. In fact, I am so terribly insecure that I can’t even bring myself to initiate conversations with the acquaintances I make through social networks online; but I refuse to sit here and watch the powerful few destroy this nation and the world that I inherited and will someday pass on to my descendants. Not without a fight.

If all this mental debris I spill into the ether paves the way for one person, maybe my kid, maybe yours, maybe… anybody, who takes up the torch and opens their eyes and continues the fight for a better, more equitable, more just and sustainable civilization, then it will all have been worth it.

The way things are right now is not the way they ought to be. We deserve better, but until we decide to put aside our petty grievances and maybe even embrace our differences, it’s not gonna happen. The “two-party” system that now controls our elections is so corrupt that it cannot be reformed. It’s going to take a revolution.

I do not advocate violence as the path to revolution. Peaceful methods have historically been proven far more effective in bringing about positive change. Violence only opens the door for the next wave of tyranny. When enough people get fed up and decide things need to change, revolution becomes possible, and we are rapidly approaching critical mass.

I’ve been thinking for a while now about how to bring about the revolution we so desperately need, but I’m still not sure I can articulate it. A movement needs to start, probably online and branching out into other venues. We need to draft and elect a committed group of people nationwide who will have only one agenda; to fix our electoral process, amend the Constitution, forever banish the influence of wealth on our government and create a strong, true democracy in place of the facade we have today.

Such an effort would require the commitment of a huge, diverse number of the American people to momentarily suspend their mistrust of each other and to act as an organized and unlikely coalition. For the good of the nation, ideological agendas would have to be put aside for the greater short term good of society.

What reforms should be part of such a revolution?

I have several in mind, though I’m sure there are others that should be considered. An end to corporate person hood is high on my list, as would be the requirement of all federal elections to be publicly funded. Political action committees and industrial lobbyists should be outlawed and parameters for greatly simplified, shortened, and focused legislation adopted. Ideas such as instant run-off voting and the expansion of the House of Representatives also have merit and should be discussed, as should the possibility of returning the election of Senators to state legislatures as intended by the founders.

I have touched upon some of these ideas in previous posts, and will be addressing others in the future. I don’t have all of the answers, in fact, I may not have any of them, but we must address these issues. We must overcome our personal fears and prejudices and transform the United States of America into the shining example of true democracy, civil rights, and sustainable values that our national mythology claims.

If not us, who? If not now, when?