A Government Of, By, and For the Oligarchs?
Hold up, Buddy, not so fast! A 1.7% Popular Vote margin is NOT a mandate for you to destroy OUR country!
Issue #780 The Choice, Tuesday, December 17, 2024
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A couple of quick reminders:
The Constitution is the law of this land, not the Bible or any other religious book.
All government officials, including the military, swear an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution, not to pledge loyalty and fealty to any one person.
We had non-partisan civics instruction when I was in school in the last century. It is quite obvious that today, the lack of civics instruction has caused many people not to understand how and why government works.
In 5th grade, we were assigned to memorize the Preamble to the Constitution of the United States, written by the Framers in Philadelphia in 1787.
Because I skipped 4th grade, I was just barely nine years old in the 5th grade. I remember going home, looking up the Preamble in our encyclopedia (remember when we had those in our homes?), and bursting into tears. All those sentences! All those big words!
My father, sensing my anxiety, took out a yellow legal pad and wrote out the Preamble by hand. It was only fifty-two words and eleven phrases. He told me, you can do this, and practiced with me until I perfected my Preamble speech.
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
Decades later, I assigned the Preamble to my 8th-grade American History and Government class at a performing arts K-8 school. However, this time, my students were allowed to choose how to present the Preamble to the class. Some students made it a spoken word speech, some sang it “rap-style,” some enacted it as a debate, some put it to music and danced contemporary-style, and one student copied the famous picture of the Founders and drew it in black-and-white freehand. It was glorious.
The three most important words of the Preamble are “We the People.” Through centuries of infighting, compromise, civil war, and amendments to the Constitution, “We the People” is supposed to mean “All the People.” However, too many Americans feel that this country is only for some, but not all Americans.
Meanwhile, less than ninety years after the Constitution was ratified, during the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln gave a very short and, at the time, seemingly unimportant speech at the battleground in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.
Allow me to revise parts of Lincoln’s speech as if President Joe Biden was delivering it today, at the end of his term:
Look friends, here is the truth, as my Dad would say: Approximately eleven score and four years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are very close to engaging in a new Civil War, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and dedicated, can long endure.
It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that this nation, shall have a renewed birth of freedom—and that government, of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
The current president-elect, who is a convicted felon, credibly accused of inciting an insurrection against Congress to keep himself in office illegally, an adjudicated rapist, and again credibly accused of trying to keep and disseminate classified government documents illegally, is now, and will continue to ignore these tenants of our history and government. He is doing this not to work towards a “more perfect union” or to be the president of, by, and for the people (ALL the people) but only to keep himself out of jail and enrich himself and his friends and family.
Some misguided people continue to promote the idea that Kamala Harris lost the election because she and the Democrats didn’t “speak to the working people” or address “kitchen table issues.” Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. Harris and Walz lost by just a little over one percentage point because of racism and sexism, as well as the malfeasance of the corporate mainstream media, which consistently promoted and “sanewashed” Trump’s lies and law-breaking and downplayed the accomplishments of Biden and Harris.
So from January 20, 2025, forward, the people in charge of our government will not be qualified and experienced public servants but (primarily) billionaire oligarchs whose mission will include destroying our public institutions and agencies, selling parts of the United States to the highest domestic or international bidder, and ensuring that only the people they approve of can reap the benefits of this nation.
The Trump Administration 2.0 is dedicated to his vision of the government will only be of the oligarchs, by the oligarchs, and for the oligarchs.
Our Choice is to stay aware, stay “woke,” resist the gaslighting and lies, and work every day to ensure that our government, “of the people, by the people, and for the people (ALL the people) shall not perish from the earth, and that we can continue to work towards a more perfect union.
We do need to be reminded over and over of what it is we might lose. If only the ignorant malevolence stopped at Little Donny.