Saturday, November 22, 2008

For the Few, By the People

On Thursday, I wrote what I consider to be the most important essay of my life. I was listening to the news while driving to my health club, and the three stories I discussed made the headlines. It took a while for it all to sink in, but as I was soaking in the jacuzzi, I felt my blood pressure go up, and I became slightly nauseous. Those stories haunted me, and I could not shake them loose from my head. I had to do something -- anything. Instead of keeping it inside, I got out of the hot tub, dried off, and marched to my car where I wrote on my laptop. I know it was not an award-winning essay. I wrote in stream-of-consciousness, and I hacked it out in less than twenty minutes before posting it to The Speechwriter.

Its importance lay not in the writing itself, but of its ideas. For me, it was therapeutic. For Sherry, it was a surprise. Like her, most people who know me never knew that I cared about Government. The truth is, for years, I have bottled up so many concerns and emotions about the state of our country. And being in a writing slump for over ten years, I have not put forth any effort to communicate those feelings to any audience. Neither, I might add, have I talked about them beyond vague conversations around an election. On Thursday, though, I found myself willing to let it go. Some of the pressure that has welled inside over the years was released, and for a few hours, I felt great.

I am deeply troubled by the direction our leaders have taken us over the past fifty years. In particular, the past twenty years seem to show that the United States of America is in a tail spin. And over the past eight years, it even feels like we may have even crashed. To me, the future looks bleak unless something changes, and I do not feel comfortable with Obama's direction. This is not simply a political-reaction. I do not feel secure that either party is prepared to lead us toward a better future.

My fears are also not a result of a troubled economy, a two-front war, or a change of leadership. Those recurrences are part of the ebb and flow of all nations. While times are tough, they do not lend themselves to my bleak outlook. The problem as I see it is much more difficult to define, but it speaks to the heart of the identity of our country. In many ways, I believe we are facing some of the very issues that Hamilton, Adams, Jefferson, Washington, and Jay faced in the 1780's. But this time, instead of seeking to unify a nation of states under one government and people, we are moving in the opposite direction towards separatism for the benefit of a few.

In doing so, our Constitution, the central group of ideas that shape our country, is under attack. Our form of government, a Republican Government, is under attack. And our economic philosophy, Capitalism, is under attack. The difficulty of seeing these assaults is due to the fact that they have been carried out over a fifty-year time span. And the enemy is us, not an outside threat. What were once small changes to our government have now evolved into a shift of identity. We have moved, slowly but surely, so far away from the original intentions of our founding fathers that I would dare say they would not recognize that which they created.

We are not a true Democracy. We are a Republic, and the Republic is bound to the Constitution and Bill of Rights, giving us a workable democratic system. The intentions of the founding fathers were written in those documents as a reaction to an overbearing monarchical rule. But they were also reacting to corruption, special interest groups, and to overwhelming foreign interference in the affairs of the young government. Instead of a continual improvement within this framework, though, we find ourselves, 200 years later, moving towards an acceptance of that which they fought against. We have an elite who rule with the bullying attitudes of monarchs, we have a Congress that is corrupt to the core, taking money from special-interest groups without remorse, and we have joined to the hip, if not mortgaged ourselves to, foreign nations. The result is a leadership who make decisions, not for the betterment of the people as a whole, but for the benefit of the few.

It would be impossible to dive into the details of our backward spin in one essay. It took eighty plus essays for Hamilton and others to outline their new philosophy of government in The Federalist Papers. It will take many more essays and discussions to make an impact today. The problem is, however, that no one wants to take up the fight. Or, if they do, they know the ramifications of fighting the status quo. This corruption goes far beyond the walls of Congress. It carries over to the media who give Congress this power and who protect its members by silencing dissension and propagating its ideas. The only people who can force a change are The People, and I find it sad to say that The People have become so lazy, so complacent, and so ignorant that they have lost the power that they once held at the founding of this country.

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