“But when a long train of abuses and usurpations…evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government….” — U.S. Declaration of Independence
Greetings my fellow Americans!
I’ve opened my nearly all of my articles for AFNN with the previous declaration. On the heels of our 246th celebration of our Declaration of Independence, and as the midterm-election-year rhetoric and the road signs with names both familiar and unfamiliar multiply, I thought this would be a good time to reflect on just what our personal responsibility, as fellow citizens of the nation known as the United States of America, and of our respective States, for preserving, protecting and defending our God-given rights and hard-fought-for individual freedom and liberty, are.
As I dive into this introspection more deeply, I think it may be worthwhile to first describe what I think this personal responsibility has come to mean to many of us. All of us alive today who were born here (and many who were not) have a privilege of voting for those who seek to represent us within the various levels and capacities of “government,” i.e., those who claim to aspire to uphold duties and responsibilities in accordance with the oaths of office by which they swear “so help me God” to abide, to maintain the sovereignty, and coherence, of our republican society. Most of us, regardless of political stripe, also believe that this periodic action is the extent of that personal responsibility, and then to return to whatever day-to-day routines we have in our lives, and expect that those we nominated to represent us will take care of the aforementioned maintenance at least until the next election, and we needn’t check in with them until it comes time to considering how to vote the next time.
Some of us were jarred out of this simplistic view (at least temporarily) by the shenanigans displayed during the COVID-19 pandemic, culminating in what was likely a rigged election (at least one of most obvious ones), and are stepping up to either run for these offices themselves, and/or ensure that they are both better informed in terms of who is running and what they claim to believe as American citizens, and the specific roles and responsibilities of the offices for which they are vying. While all of these are positive changes—and with all due respect—relying solely on our electoral process to “get our country back on track” is precisely how we got to the point where the rights “endowed by our Creator” could be summarily revoked by those same people in government who swore to preserve, protect and defend (not grant nor revoke) those rights under our national and State constitutions.
We’ve allowed our news and social media (purportedly on both sides of the political aisle) to distract us with their narratives about what matters, about what we should care, and where we should focus when it comes to fixing our broken system. We think that by spending time watching or listening to them we are staying informed of what’s important and who is saying and/or doing the most to address it, either as a current member of the public sector or one seeking membership in it, and mostly at the national level. Whether it’s “build back better” or “drain the swamp,” it seems that Washington D.C. is the lynchpin to everything that ails us, and we just need to elect the right personalities or heroes to right the wrongs of humanity which have been perpetrated against the rest of the world by the United States, and everything else will fall into line and take care of itself.
The woeful degradation of our system of education being one of the symptoms of the general neglect of our personal responsibility, it is not hard to understand why elections have become our straw man for encapsulating the rights, freedom and liberty which supposedly have set America apart from other nations. While it is true that many people still live under rulers where such elections are unheard of, there are many others who do participate in voting systems which are nothing more than symbolic gestures where, although the people technically show up at the polls, the incumbent office-holders procure over 90% of “the vote” to maintain their positions of power. (Sadly, we also have many such incumbents within our own borders, who have been in “public office” for nearly half a century, and again face token opposition for re-election).
We’ve all got to do a better job of holding our elected officials accountable, and not just once every two or four years. We also need to break free of the national and worldwide media hypnosis that monopolizes our attention to remote affairs into which we have no exposure except through their lenses, and get out of our houses, cars, places of employment, etc., and observing the world and people in our own back yards. Whether in a primary or general election, there is usually a long list of names; how many do we actually recognize or know personally, versus their political party affiliations? How often do we personally encounter or communicate with them once in office, and know how they are voting, or have voted, on issues which have a direct effect on our lives? How far back are we retaining knowledge of these votes, and not allowing the media and/or their campaign ads to whitewash our memories and rewrite history as they seek re-election?
How much of the heavy lifting are we doing ourselves, in our daily lives as Americans, to personally preserve, protect and defend the United States of America?
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It often becomes difficult to focus on keeping our elected pols from straying when way too often we might disagree on there even being a problem, much less its severity.
The system itself, has thrown in roadblocks to keeping the proverbial gun to the head of pols we should know are up to no good, along with the same pols being part of that system.
As far as my communication to my elected reps goes, it is only done when I see something that needs special attention, or I see great risk if those pols vote or politic with less precision than needed. That’s one of those “we all could do better” things, I believe.
With certain votes, my memory can go way back, depending on what I view as the importance of the event or law passed. Complacency can be a problem with too many of us.
Now, it seems that the best we can do in thew political system is to fight back against all the stuff that we know will do only harm, because of it being blatantly political and that the ideology is fully exposed, which, if it needs to be in that category alone, it almost certainly can be worthless or harmful only.