"We enjoy freedom and the rule of law on which it depends, not because we deserve it, but because others before us put their lives on the line to defend it." -- Thomas Sowell (1930- ) Writer & economist
George Will started his Memorial Day column quoting “The young dead soldiers” poem that stated, “our deaths are not ours: they are yours they will mean what you make them.” I’m guessing if they knew that our nation would be so divided and dysfunctional now, they would not feel that their ultimate sacrifice was worth it. And our constitution is no closer now to forming a more perfect union or achieving any of the other six intentions in its preamble because it was flawed from the start by a majority vote of 38 rich white males defining and then codifying that slaves were only three fifths of a human being.
On top of that flaw those deliberating males failed to codify the one fundamental element needed for the ‘rule of law’ to be effective and sustainable in new republic - the universal principle of justice. Their voting had also limited inalienable human rights for all indigenous people and women. And they ignored other vital rights that still today allow people to go hungry in the midst of unprecedented wealth and resources. This remains shameful and a dangerously disruptive force nationally and globally.
Our Constitution persists in enabling our nation to send
our soldiers into war and weapons to dictatorships whenever and wherever a
majority of our democratically elected leaders decide. That is a fault of ‘we
the people” for not holding them accountable in elections. The wars
and alliances our nation has been involved in for both good and bad intentions have
resulted in the murder and maiming of millions of innocent men, women, and children
in other nations.
Wars and alliances that even now are increasingly and accelerating chaos is creating multiple global problems for most people. Problems and threats that require global solutions if humanity ever intends to effectively reduce or eliminate refugee flows, terrorism, extreme weather conditions, pandemics, corruption, and cyber security threats that fuel corruption, populist movements, and destabilizing of other democratic nations - while more autocratic nations survive and align.
Thus, the greatest flaw in our US Constitution is the failure of those 38 white males representing 13 states with different priorities to codify into it the most important fundamental principles offered in our Declaration of Independence. A narrow majority engineered our nation’s blueprint with the illusion of independence. A delusional word that exists nowhere in our irreversibly interdependent reality. Their flawed vote dictated that only some people have inalienable rights. That error led to our civil war that killed more Americans than all the other wars our nation has fought in since then...combined!
And that same flawed belief in our leaders exist now clearly ignoring the “the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God” that sparked our nation’s founding. This profound wisdom remains a self-evident truth to anyone with Common Sense regarding nature and the golden rule. Failing these is the origin of nearly all the problems we now face by taking care of, or being fair to, all those in our community, nation, and world.
The brave American men and women who have fought and died during or after our Civil war believed they were protecting our freedoms and security. They were gravely misled in believing that defending our Constitution would do that. In reality, no number of soldiers or quantity of powerful weaponry provided by such a delusional government system could ever protect any nation’s population against any global threats like terrorism, extreme weather events, pandemics, cyber-attacks, and globally unprecedented and unregulated wealth. Wealth that can easily spread corruption across political or geographic borders.
Virtues, responsibility, and accountability are humanities’ only sustainable protections against most of the threats to freedom and security here and abroad. As Abraham Lincoln said, our Declaration of Independence is our “Apple of Gold” and our Constitution its “Frame of Silver”. Yet our government agents swear to protect the frame - not the freedom and security of those wishing to survive and thrive on our Goldilocks planet our creator has gifted us with.
That the aggressor, who puts himself into the state of war with another, and unjustly invades another man's right, can, by such an unjust war, never come to have a right over the conquered, will be easily agreed by all men, who will not think that robbers and pirates have a right of empire over whomsoever they have force enough to master, or that men are bound by promises which unlawful force extorts from them. – John Locke, The Second Treatise of Civil Government [1690]
""Wars begin in the minds of men, and in those minds, love and compassion would have built the defenses of peace." - U Thant
“Mankind must put an end to war before war puts an end to mankind.” John F. Kennedy.
“If we don’t end war, war will end us.” H.G. Wells
“Either war is obsolete, or men are.” R. Buckminster Fuller
"Although you may spend your life killing, You will not exhaust all your foes. But if you quell your own anger, your real enemy will be slain." Nagarjuna
"Peace cannot exist where justice is not served.” - John Lewis
"We used to wonder where war lived, what it was that made it so vile. And now we realize that we know where it lives...inside ourselves." Albert Camus
"Although you may spend your life killing, you will not exhaust all your foes. But if you quell your own anger, your real enemy will be slain." Nagarjuna, India, alive circa 200 CE
"We used to wonder where war lived, what it was that made it so vile. And now we realize that we know where it lives...inside ourselves." Albert Camus
"Wars will be stopped only when soldiers refuse to fight, when workers refuse to load weapons onto ships and aircraft, when people boycott the economic outposts of Empire that are strung across the globe. " - Arundhati Roy, Public Power in the Age of Empire
"Come you masters of war You that build all the guns You that build the death planes You that build the big bombs You that hide behind walls You that hide behind desks I just want you to know I can see through your masks." - Bob Dylan
"Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is humanity's original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion." Oscar Wilde, 1854-1900
"When the people fear the government there is tyranny, when the government fears the people there is liberty." - Thomas Jefferson
"Intelligent discontent is the mainspring of civilization." - Eugene Victor Debs
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