Stuff, and Occasional Nonsense

This could have been a beautiful place.

We had all the right elements: checks, balances, a bill of rights, a system of government designed by men who would have preferred not to have a government at all, but who were determined to keep it under the people's control. They understood the fact that power must be granted from the bottom up, not taken from the top down.

They had already seen the failures of so many other systems; they knew the ugliness that could happen when personal beliefs collide with public policy. They had seen it in the imperialistic wars over a tiny scrap of desert hundreds of years before. They had seen it in the screaming faces of people who had their hearts torn out as sacrifices atop stone pyramids. They had seen hysteria turn to murder in a small Massachussetts town in 1692, and many times before that all across Europe.

So they carefully excised all traces of this ugliness from their fledgling government with ten simple words: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion."

And around that basic freedom, and others, they built a simple, adaptable, elegant (one might even say "intelligently designed") system under which to run their new nation.

It wasn't perfect, but the mechanisms were there to improve it, to fix the inevitable holes. One such hole was patched in 1863, another in 1920, yet another in 1964. All it takes is the will of the people, and the system can adapt to changes in their lives.

But sadly, the mechanism that allowed so much flexibility also seems to have allowed for its own demise. When the will of the people is bent to the will of the forces the system was designed to exclude, through fear, coercion, lies, and manipulation, those forces creep into the cracks in the system, and destroy it from within.

Greed and the hunger for power have always existed, and will always exist. As have the desire for people to belong, to be taken care of, to feel safe. But those who are greedy and hunger for power always twist that desire to belong and feel safe to their own ends. They invent enemies out of thin air, frighten people into doing what they want, promise them happiness they are incapable of delivering, wrap them in a blanket of control and obedience and falsely call it "safety."

And so today we live in a system than the men who created it would barely recognize: where churches are lucrative (and tax-free) businesses, where the executive branch are corrupt toadies to corporations and start trumped-up illegal "wars" to keep their money flowing, where these forces have aligned to wage war on the nature of reality itself and infect the minds of children, all to keep the machine that fuels their own greed and power-hunger going.

Those of us who recognize these men for what they are have to fight tooth-and-nail to keep them from changing the system itself, because on paper, the nation is still ours. But all it would take would be a few well-placed blows to bring the whole thing crashing down, and they could build their own system in its place. Those blows would be struck by the ones who have the most to lose from the destruction of the system, the people, and they would do it in the name of the greedy power-hungry men whom they have been hoodwinked into loving.

So the rest of us fight exhausting battles against the intrusions of these forces and waste our time arguing ideas that would have been settled a long time ago, if not for these corrupt men twisting the lies into something called "faith." We scream and shout at the people to try to convince them that this is not their will; that they have been misled, lied to, betrayed. The wolves have been at our door all along, but we manage to keep beating them back.

This could have been a beautiful place, and maybe it still could be. But it's going to take an awakening of "the people" for it to happen. Only we can destroy this nation, and only we can save it.