Constitution Day: Sept 17, 2022.
Please read the preamble of our
Constitution. Give each of its goals a school grade.
a. Form
a more Perfect Union,
b. establish
Justice
c. insure
domestic Tranquility
d. provide
for the common defence
e. promote
the general Welfare.
f.
secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves
g. and
our Posterity
If the Emperor has no
clothes, the Constitution only has a thong.
Thomas Jefferson said, “Every constitution, then, and
every law, naturally expires at the end of 19 years” because “the earth belongs
always to the living and not to the dead... The only “umpire”
between the generations is the ”law of nature.” - Thomas
Jefferson, c.1789
Abraham Lincoln wrote that our “Declaration of Independence is
our Apple of Gold”. And “Our
Constitution” is its “Frame of Silver”.
Our founders engineered our government system on the
illusionary concept of independence. We have
Amendments that fail to ensure liberty and justice for all. But it offers us the ability to amend it again.
We have no constitutional justice system. We have a Department of Justice. And a supreme court with an arbitrary number
of Justices. But no justice. Not domestically or internationally. We
have instead a ‘legal system”. Laws
passed by majority votes. By elected
officials put into office with roughly the approval of about 25% of the US population
of voters. Thus, those experienced in
our “criminal justice” system know that actual criminals are better off being
rich and guilty than innocent and poor.
Our two-party political system is not in the Constitution. Yet these parties and those elected by “We
the People” swore an oath to protect the Constitution. And we/they have allowed the two-party system
to persist as a major source of dysfunction.
Why? “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...” This is in the second paragraph of our
Declaration of Independence.
Even before the GOP went off the rails in electing Trump in 2016 – and he and his mentally warped followers attempted to reinstate him as President after the 2020 election - our nation’s best national security experts were asked to list our nation’s greatest threats. They put our nation’s own “government dysfunction” as number two. Terrorism was first. When making that assessment they didn’t even consider a white supremacy biological weapon targeting Blacks or Jews. Or an anti-government conspiracy extremist using a bioweapon to incite national disorder. Or a pandemic threat from nature - or ‘gain of function’ research accident. They ranked the threat of our own government dysfunction above Russia, China, N. Korea, Iran, or climate change. And Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI) wasn’t on their list. Things change. Our Constitution hasn’t. And things have gotten worse. Only an eternal optimist would believe things are going to get better if we just let things be.
There are other flaws engineered into the Constitution. None are hardwired. It gave “we the people” four ways to make amendments. Only two have ever been used.
Why have we stubbornly ignored changing it? How
could it be amended to actually achieve the 7 intentions stated for us in its
original preamble? So far, we have only protected it. Not ourselves. Yet anyone who has worked in
the US government, or pledged “liberty and justice for all” before our flag has
done anything to Amend it. Why? Cognitive Dissonance?
Shred the Constitution? During the Cold War, a secondary government was
created to replace the real government had there been a nuclear war that obliterated
it. Those who proposed and then organized such a ‘replacement
government’ suggested ‘shredding the Constitution” and starting over. What
could have been their reasoning?
Justice
Ruth Bader Ginzberg once said, "I would not use the US
Constitution as a template if I was creating a new constitution."
Economist Frederic Bastiat once said, "When
plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society,
they create for themselves in the course of time a legal system that authorizes
it and a moral code that glorifies it." -
Where did we the people go
wrong?
"Elections are held to
delude the populace into believing that they are participating in
government." - Gerald F. Lieberman
It doesn’t
appear that democracy gets us there.
"You want sanity,
democracy, community, an intact Earth? We can't get there obeying
Constitutional theory and law crafted by slave masters, imperialists, corporate
masters, and Nature destroyers. We can't get there kneeling before robed
lawyers stockpiling class plunder precedent up their venerable sleeves. So
isn't disobedience the challenge of our age? Principled, inventive, escalating
disobedience to liberate our souls, to transfigure our work as humans on this
Earth." Richard Grossman
What human wouldn’t want a healthy mind, body, spirit, family, and environment? All of these are predicated
on having a healthy government and economy.
We have neither. We have
crippling debt and endless wars (terrorism can never be defeated with military
power) with weapon systems we cannot stop (Cyber, biological, nano...conventional
trucks loaded with fuel oil and fertilizer-thank you, Timothy McVeigh).
The
fundamental principle underlying ‘health’ is ‘prevention’. No justice, no peace. And we are not independent. Not us, our agencies, or any of our levels of
national government. “Everything is connected, everything is
interdependent, so everything is vulnerable.... And that’s why this has to be
a more than whole of government, a more than whole of nation [effort]. It
really has to be a global effort....” Jen Easterly. Cyber and
Infrastructure Security Agency director [CISA is our nation’s newest federal
agency established in 2018].
Hopefully,
Ms. Easterly understands that our environment is our most vital infrastructure!
And human security everywhere is inherently and irreversibly connected to it.
Security is
an illusion. And unless we are responsible and virtuous with our freedoms,
Americans and the rest of humanity will continue to lose both.
An engineering solution?
The Rule of Law.
Prioritizing laws supporting “the Laws of Nature and
Nature’s God” noting that the three most complicated and complex systems in the
known universe are
1. The
environment.
2. Our
immune system
3. The
human brain/mind.
We exist today because we have survived over the 3 billion
years of life’s evolution in a hostile and constantly changing environment. Our immune systems have struggled to keep
pace with the evolution of trillions of variations of microbial threats. Billions of lives were crippled or lost to various
pathogens.
Only in the last few hundred years has our mind discovered how
to deal with these threats and started adapting our human infrastructure
(water, sanitation, medical, health, habitat, food production/distribution) to
reduce their effects. The Smallpox vaccine alone has saved more lives in the
past 70 years than all the governments have killed in wars and genocides
combined, over the last 120 years.
These fundamental things only for us relatively wealthy
people only... will not do. Our civilized life
has essentially weakened our immune system. And our mind is the primary source
of that weakening. Our cognitive flaws
blocked our need to adjust and invest in fundamental global prevention measures
to reduce most of the microbial threats are now facing at an accelerating pace.
Many of our actions exacerbated them. Especially our war system. A global governance system that puts the
protection of national sovereignty and corporations far above the global
protection of human rights and the environment.
Unless ‘we the people' of earth, force our governments to
come together to engineer a global governance system that prizes the global “rule
of Law” over the global lawlessness that we are all now threatened by, we cannot wait
for AI to step in and make us do it.
It’s either
“life”, “liberty and justice for all” (On earth as it is in Heaven), or hell for
all.
Our minds are only a tool.
It has abandoned its original purpose of solving
problems so our body and family can survive and thrive. It has taken on an identity that will kill
and die in defense of lethal ideologies (political, religious, economic,
anti-science, nationalism, racism…). It has simply got too creative in
inventing ideas (and conspiracy theories) that are inconsistent with “the Laws
of Nature and Nature’s God”.
It
got addicted to being an identity - instead of the whole body being a living,
breathing entity. One that is entirely
interdependent on this planet - and infinitely vulnerable when surround by
injustices and a declining global life support system (God’s creation?).
If
we fail to grasp this fundamental principle that the voice in our head is NOT
who we really are, it may be the end of our evolutionary journey.
Talk, talk,
talk. We need to do! And here is the only rational game plan I’m
aware of. The UN’s 17 Sustainable
Development Goals. Measure our progress
on the SDGs, not our GNP.
The
Sustainable Development Goals need urgent attention and action if they are to
be achieved by the year 2030. Pick your
favorite goal but know that they all need to be achieved together
comprehensively.
Why? Because “Everything is connected,
interdependent and vulnerable. See the connections! Understand the network of all life. Work for global justice. Or prepare for the consequences.
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