get outa jail

.                                 Change of Circumstance
Some union huh? The United States was born out of revolution. The crazy king was treating his own people as second-class citizens. The French and Spanish kings were not doing this. Where is the justice in that? This ill treatment came about in the lifetime of most of the original patriots. The king and many of his island subjects were paying a dear price for the Seven Years War with France. The declaration of independence is replete with examples of the injustices. At this very time in history a revolution of ideas was occurring, the enlightenment. Mix the two and you have something that even the authors of the constitution could not fully grasp, nor did they pretend to. They simply tried their best.

The preamble to the constitution, which legal scholars agree, has no force in law, States: ”We the people (herein after known as property holders) in order to firm a more perfect union (of states) … do establish this constitution.” The founders were petty successful in that but for the various suffrage movements, slavery, the sovereignty of native nations and immigration. And so, the revolution continues. We have changed the meaning of the preamble, which is our right, to mean what it says, without the brackets. We and by extension, the rest of the Americas have become pluralistic. So much so that authoritarian leaders throughout the world feel threatened. Witness the fall of communist regimes in eastern Europe, the Arab Spring, the world wide indigenous movement to protect the land and water, the struggles to preserve cultural identity throughout Africa, in India and in China. The voice of ‘we the people’ is being heard in Moscow and throughout Russia. The people allied against authoritarianism is a powerful struggle and it began in the US by accident. You gotta love it if you’re not one of the landed gentry. In their way they require authoritarian protection because ownership was never a sound idea.

Looked at from this lens, it is not so unusual that the socialists and libertarians are joining forces, temporarily, to rebel against the status quo. They can fight together or die separately. Their combined pressure on the powers that be is showing considerable strength. So much so that the propagandists are  being forced into exposing themselves. In addition, the real news people cannot keep fully abreast of what is really going on.

Now let’s talk about the military. Truman, to his credit, integrated the armed forces long before it happened in the rest of the country. As a pluralistic entity the military is no friend of those who seek to divide us. Let’s call this the Crackers Dilemma. They continue to try to subvert the military, who they want as a natural ally, but to little avail. The military is prone, however, to socialist and libertarian notions. This is because they have long been a part of the fabric of the country. The military is also witness to what Ike deemed ‘the military industrial complex.’ They see the role of Raytheon, Haliburton and others every day and they see the high cost of war. I do not expect the military to blindly accept this cost, especially when led by chicken hawks, as they currently are.

A word about the spiritual world. Moral leadership has little to do with sermonizing. It is all about doing the right thing in so far as you can see what the right thing is. The truly innocent do not suffer from guilt, nor do they deny it. They do not see good and evil (original sin) but rather, they see what is. They know well that they will be persecuted for speaking the truth and they try to act in accordance with this fateful knowledge. As such, they are not subject to the falsities of Mammon (an old name for materialists). The truly spiritual do not see sanctity of life as a cause but as an end. The hypocrisy of senseless war is too apparent to feel otherwise. To speak of such matters is beyond me except to say that pure evil and pure goodness are unknowable in our realm. Thus, even Putin has some good qualities, perhaps as many as Falwell. Hypocrisy and the lack of structural moral leadership has led religion into decline save for those who pray aloud.