Happy final Independence Day everyone.
I don’t think that this has to be our final Independence Day but we damn well better start behaving as though it could be.
This nation was founded on a very special and revolutionary idea:
that all men are created equal.
That they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.
That idea was set out in the Declaration of Independence, unanimously adopted by the Congress of the United States of America on July 4, 1776.
In that document the members of that Congress declared that government’s main job was to secure for the people those unalienable rights.
They also declared that “whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it and institute new government laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.”
Well I see a government right now enforcing a system in which those who are born with great wealth are not considered equal to the rest of us.
I see a Supreme Court declaring that the laws do not apply to those who have once possessed great political power the same way they do to the rest of us.
I see state governments being permitted to deny unalienable human rights to some of their citizens.
The members of the Congress of the United States of America in 1776 would call that “a history of repeated injuries and usurpations all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny”
By my reckoning that history of repeated injuries and usurpations has been going on now for 40 years. And it’s getting a whole lot worse. So much so that if we allow the forces of despotism to take power this November it’s gonna be mighty hard to stop.
In the Declaration of Independence it says when there is “a long train of abuses and usurpations” designed to reduce the people “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.”
This is not the first time in our history that our government has gone astray. And in the past we the people have been able to correct things by voting to keep the human rights abusers, the authoritarians and the scalawags out of office.
And we have a chance to do that again this November.
But some branches of our government have already been taken over by people who clearly do not believe in equality and human rights. People who think that government’ s job is to keep the people in line and subservient to wealthy aristocrats and corporations, theocratic dogmatists or authoritarian conmen.
And if they are able to come to complete power this November we will no longer be able to fix the problem by altering our accustomed form of government. We will have been reduced to absolute tyranny and our only recourse will be revolution.
Altering our form of government through the electoral process is a whole lot easier than abolishing and replacing despotism once it has gotten into complete power.
My fond hope this Independence Day 2024 is that we will succeed in November and be able to celebrate again in 2025.
And I hope you all share that hope.