Relevant again, the Declaration of Independence revisited
Which alternative truths do we hold to be self-evident?
We are embarking upon the most challenging periods in our history in that the threats we face as a nation are not necessarily the conjured-up plans of some suspicious foreign power; rather, they are the combination of years of arrogant and short-sighted foreign policy. We’ve become a diseased form of capitalism that threatens to hijack our now complacent government. This “disease” can use the government’s own citizens as prey and its corporations, its spies.
For years or lawmakers claimed that “we the people” were against being “isolationist,” but what did that mean?
In truth, what that really meant was that our nation did not want to be neutral. It wants to pick a side. And in picking a side, it must always be on the right one. A dead person can never tell her story, but they can tell it for her and make us the heroes. We are the superior, she the inferior. Our nation, without question, is honorable. We always pick the leader that leads proper, even a wanton despot, entertainment news, his national security advisors.
Our nation was so honorable and so anti-isolationist that it became the world’s savior and police officer, true? It, as the only honorable and moral nation in the world, as the free republic, as the greatest democracy, can lead the globe through American supremacy in both military strength and financial dominance. This proves our superiority and purity in the eyes of God as better than all other nations and human beings. He has blessed the secular Christian in us.
God Bless America and all others must obey us to appreciate being free. Embrace Apple, Amazon, Golden Arches, Windows, Walmart, and Bibles in our hotel chain nightstands, or die. Be sure to post your demise on Zuckerberg’s Facebook first.
For anyone that is “rogue” or “defiant,” there is a financial “sanction” that will starve the common people more than the elite. If such a state does not see the honor in our superiority and morality, then we will strike with might. And bombing will surely kill many more common people than elite, but that’s fine as long as the nation tells all of us at home that the operation is named properly as to not offend: “[the people we are bombing and killing with WMDs here] freedom.”
Political correctness is very important in our country, I would have you know. We are very sensitive about offending ourselves.
Political correctness—though a well-intentioned form of kindness—has quickly become a sneaky form of repressive and dangerous censure, and our “zero tolerance,”—our cancel culture—for honesty can make our nation of grand fallacy over one of stark truth, and no matter how powerful, no honorable nation can survive on fallacy alone.
I fear our democracy is dead. It was cut to die on 9/11, not by the mostly Saudi men that carried out the attacks, but by our own hands years before.
Do you remember when “greed was good?”
But greed breeds hurt, hate, and retribution. Greed breeds instability, power vacuums, the need to build and use a military machine, to buy and sell WMDs.
Greed makes a convenient friend on day one, a spy on day two, a bedfellow on day three, and a dead body on day four, and his terrorist son on day five; and he gets “enhanced interrogation” at a “black” site from a government contractor in Romania on day six. Who knows what will happen on day seven? Do you? A hacked-to-death Washington Post journalist, a gift-warning from a Saudi King’s son [sic] guards? Does he pay for our military protection now?
We accuse him and say, “Why do you hate America? Why do you hate freedom?” Do you mean Operation “Iraqi Freedom” that killed countless Iraqis and sickened and traumatized millions of kids? It’s birth of ISIS? Who attacked us? Saudi men from a terrorist network that the U.S. helped create when it abandoned Afghanistan and its “friends” years before. Who are the Kurds now but friend-forced foes, and what does their future hold?
You know, I’ve been asked the same questions. I think I fear my nation more.
Because there is no freedom in sanctions; no honor in censure, no freedom in intimidation, no honor in murder, no freedom in lies, no honor in myths, and no government “of the people, for the people, and by the people” in killing people over the differences ideas of the mind bring.
No, those on top cancel or kill for profit, for power, and for control. People are in the way or are prey to use to prop up those ethically and morally void of humanity. We need resources, but greed is the real threat to our national security, not people that hurt.
No matter how many times “In God We Trust,” it’s a nation shrouded in rhetorically disguised corruption and mistrust. Lawmakers can make “crime” precise and so much so it’s as if no “crime” was ever committed. And they could, if desired, frame others just the same. That’s what alternative truths and greed can do, but it does not make a nation, only a despotism masquerading as something mythic, grandiose, and “new.” It’s the pretty repackaging of a horror anew.
No, we are not alone in our disease, nor is our leader in his, but we lead the world in it, and in that should we be proud? Do we call this freedom? Do we call this democracy? Do we call this free-thinking? Are we sure we the people are not we the prey? Will we stand against a President that wants to be king? Can the Declaration of Independence and its Despot foe be déjà vu?
We still have our minds and our liberty and somewhere we still have our country.
We want our country back. Do you?
Maybe it’s time to send a message to all on Capitol Hill, a statement: a vote in voting out everyone “responsible” that holds office, no matter what the label.
Please read that old Declaration:
“Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn 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 them 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” (Declaration of Independence, in Congress, July 4, 1776).
Earl Yarington (LMSW) is a social worker and school bus driver. He taught literature and writing for nearly 20 years and spent 3 years working in forensic social work internships with offending populations, including work at Delaware Correctional facilities and the Federal Bureau of Prisons. He has a PhD in literature and criticism (feminism/women writers) from Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Master of Social Work from Louisiana State University, and an interdisciplinary Master of Liberal Arts from Arizona State University, where he studied the impact of visual image and girlhood in media/social media. He also has an MA and BS in English from SUNY College at Brockport. The opinions and analyses that Earl writes are his own and are not necessarily the positions or views of his employers, the agencies he supports, or that of his colleagues. Reach out with comments or questions.