This entry marks the end of an unofficial series, written as more or less a PostScript to the book I just published on Amazon called “Human Sense” and intentionally timed to go live over the two or three-week period running up to the 2024 elections, which will happen less than a week after I hit “publish” on this entry.
The first of these entries, “Impugning Impunity”,” inspected some of the ways and some of the culprits that engage us in lies, half-truths, and intentionally misleading information shared with the general public. A bit of inquiry was pursued into some of the motivations that might lie at the roots of this dynamic in the National conversation.
The second entry, “Divide et Impera” centered around why, and for what greater purpose, thought leaders and ruling authorities might choose to break up our society into smaller, more easily managed groups – pitting us against each other in the National conversation- and what effect this might have on the longer term future of the American Nation.
This last entry, after spending the better part of two years observing the campaign season that is finally, by the grace of God, less than a week away from being behind us, has been the ugliest I have seen in my lifetime—and that’s saying a lot, given that I’m nearing my 67th birthday.
Growing up in a Maryland suburb of Washington, DC, I was familiar with the world of politics. Politics was a regular topic of conversation between my mother, grandmother, and extended family members as they came and went for holiday gatherings. I let all of it go in one ear and out the other, but I began paying closer attention in late November of 1963 – I was five — when my mother and grandmother were crying, watching in horror as live reports were coming in on our round black-and-white TV.
On that day, the president of the United States had been assassinated. It had nothing to do with politics; a wife had lost her husband, children had lost their father, and a nation had lost a son who just happened to be the leader of the Free World. The five-year-old me only understood that something bad had happened; my family and my country were in mourning, and the world was in trouble.
Five years later, when I was 10, it would be the assassination of Martin Luther King that put my family in front of a television again. The events that followed his death directly affected my family, up close and personal, because my mother, grandmother, and many members of my extended family worked in DC, which had been set on fire, and large swaths of the city had been destroyed in the ensuing riots.
In the years since MLK’s death, with so many attempted assassinations, successful assassinations, riots, social decay and collapse, and so many armed conflicts around the world, no fair-minded person could honestly say that the world today is a better place than it was six decades ago. And even as I draw such a conclusion from my personal lived experience, I know all too well that there are uncountable numbers of others around the world who have seen far worse. This is a great sadness.
I chose the title of this entry specifically because of something I have learned about the world as I understand it since I lost much of my eyesight. After my health struggles, the less I could see with my eyes, the more I noticed things in my visual field that did not belong there. I recognize readers might be confused by this, but the simplest example that comes to mind is my ability, riding along in the passenger seat on an interstate, to see speed traps long before the driver… Not because I can see the state trooper hiding in the trees, but because the color of that car does not belong with the color of the leaves under which it is trying to hide.
In the truest sense of a metaphorical parable, lumped together with the sage advice from my grandmother as I was growing up, we have reached that point where you can only “believe half of what you see and none of what you hear.” and more true today than it has ever been in my lifetime, it is being demanded of us that we close our eyes all together so we are unable to see all of the things that “don’t belong”in a Constitutional Federal Republic.
I’m reminded of the biblical story about the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus said, “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.” This warning from a man 2 Millennia ago applies just as well to what we see all around us in the modern era. Today’s wolves, cloaked in national flags, assure people in soft and soothing tones that they have our best interests in mind, even as they are laying waste to our futures, and the futures of generations yet to come, for what they assure us is the greater good despite it seeming to be of no real benefit to anyone but themselves.
Consider this excerpt from my first book, “Unwashed Philosophy: A User’s Guide For Our Imperfect Union” :
“The Founders understood, having experienced it themselves, the effects of tyrannical oppression, by the central monarchy and the elite ruling classes on the lives, liberties, and freedoms of the individual. So, too, did they recognize, in the interest of assuring peaceful coexistence with coequality amongst and between the citizenry, that a balance between Central Authority and individual sovereignty and self-determination must be found and fiercely defended.
Further, they had warned us against depending “on accident and force for our political constitutions.” They implored us to be wary of “views, passions and prejudices little favorable to the discovery of truth.” As well, while celebrating the idea that this nation must surely have been designed by Providence, in Federalist No. 2, they forcefully insisted that we “should never be split into a number of unsocial, jealous, and alien sovereignties” while, in Federalist No. 6, they made soberly clear the very real probability that, given Mankind’s propensity for “ambitious, vindictive, and rapacious” behavior, only an efficiently run, minimally-invasive, and judiciously managed government would prevent its citizenry from being “subject to the impulses of rage, resentment, jealousy, avarice, and of other irregular and violent propensities.”
There is an old expression that suggests, “We get the government we vote for,” but this does not tell the whole story. We keep hearing that democracy is on the ballot, that if the wrong people win, democracy will be lost forever, and that the entire future of the American Nation is at risk. This is a lie, and it’s being told to scare us into voting – even if we have to hold our noses to do so – for people who do not have our best interests in mind. The truth of the matter is not that democracy is at risk. In reality, we are being asked to surrender more of our Freedoms, Liberties, and rights to self-determination in exchange for securing something we already have – a constitutional federal republic managed by those duly (and democratically) elected into office with the promise that they will serve at the pleasure of those who elected them into their respective offices.
What doesn’t belong in our constitutional federal republic are lies told by the people we trust to nurture and sustain it, such as the idea that we must sacrifice pieces of it to keep it.
What doesn’t belong in our constitutional federal republic is an unelected bureaucracy four times as large as the government itself, turning the American people against themselves to fight it out on the streets as it gets richer, more powerful, and further isolated from the rest of society.
What doesn’t belong in our constitutional federal republic is a multi-tier justice system where those in power persecute those seeking it to be prevented from achieving it.
What doesn’t belong in our constitutional federal republic is a system of laws selectively enforced, selectively prosecuted, or punishment selectively applied.
What doesn’t belong in our constitutional federal republic is placing a higher value on the lives of some over the value of the lives of others.
Over six decades ago, in his inaugural speech in 1961, JFK said, “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.” I suggest that no matter who wins, from the president to the local dog catcher, your vote will change nothing as it relates to our current system of governance, the subsidiary bureaucracy underneath it, the third rail that spans across its entirety, or any ruling Authority at the federal, state, or local level.
Now that I have your attention, and I understand that you are leaning forward and getting ready to protest, I remind readers that all politics is local. America is comprised of what looks back at you in the mirror, who waves back at you when you’re looking down the street, the people with whom you conduct Commerce – directly – or to whom you submit your payments for the daily necessities of your life. She is based on the idea that a united society comprises many disparate parts, the sum of which is greater than the whole. Further, as important as the next election might be, what matters far more is what all of us are going to do for our country in the days after the election is finally over.
Our rights to Freedom, Liberty, and self-determination were not given to us by the government; they were given to us by a higher power than the government and Affirmed by the government in the Constitution and Bill of Rights. How we exercise them going forward will determine the seriousness of our Collective resolve to save our federal constitutional republic.
