An Alternative Plan for a New American Century

An Alternative Plan for a New American Century

We are united as Americans not by common ancestry or race or religion but by our Constitution, by its Bill of Rights and by our belief that we are all of us on earth created equal and endowed with inalienable rights among which are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and that our government is the tool by which we secure those rights.

Together we are like one large, extended family with members dispersed coast to coast, border to border, in Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico and individually around the world.

We intend to preserve life, not just American lives but all lives, throughout our world. We intend that each one of us will be able freely to develop herself to the best of his ability and that in this way we may achieve our own happiness and contribute to the happiness of others.

Our way of life requires a rededication to these beliefs every generation for we know, as our “founding fathers” well knew, that all human institutions tend toward corruption from the moment they are born; and so like all others our government must be reformed, redirected, and rededicated each generation if it is to continue to serve us and to remain faithful to the ideals we have set out. This cyclic reform, redirection and rededication is what we refer to when we refer to self government, to democracy.

We must govern ourselves, for there are many others only too willing to govern us if we do not.

Our nation has grown tremendously in just under 250 years. We have much to be proud of. Certainly we are a technological and economic colossus. And we individual Americans, on the whole fortunate ourselves, have been generous to others and good citizens of the world as well as of our nation.

We look forward to a future in which all of us will be healthier, better educated, at peace with our neighbors, physically more secure and better able to enjoy our freedom without fear. Yet it is ironic that we Americans, citizens of “the sole superpower”, do not now enjoy freedom from fear.

The mass-murders of September 11, 2001 certainly sent a sudden spike of fear through our nation, but the fallout from those mass-murders, our response as a nation to those mass-murders, has over the past eight years shown just how driven by fear we Americans are with respect to many of the other ordinary circumstances of our lives.

We fear “terrorism” as we fear the unknown because we have not looked at it squarely and taken its measure but have reacted blindly, striking back at whatever seemed at the moment to be a probable source of our fear.

We fear losing our jobs with the same unreason, because we have not looked the evolving world economy squarely in the eye and taken its measure. And we have not looked those who have taken charge of our finances squarely in the eye and taken their measure.

We fear illness. Although medicine has made greater strides in the past few decades than in the preceding hundreds of years we are all now terrified of being struck ill and bankrupted by the medical machine that has grown up to prey upon us, even as it delivers the fruits of medical science.

We fear growing old impoverished, and/or working to our dying days to continue to keep our bodies and souls together.

And in the midst of our own unmindful response to our fear we seem willing to give up the ideals of our founding fathers as we give up the mechanisms of protection they wisely built into our Constitution, and the rights they enumerated in its first ten amendments.

A great democratic leader once addressed us thus : “We have nothing to fear but fear itself”. And that remains the truth today and will be as true tomorrow.

At the root of our fears is our loss of control over our own destiny.

No one has wrest it from out of our hands. We have let it slip through our very own fingers. We have for several decades stood aside from the reform, redirect, rededicate cycle that is the lifeblood of our institutionalized system of government.

It seems to be a part of our American nature especially to distance ourselves from politics. We are a practical people. Politics we view as a field of necessary but unsavory complications.

So we seek to “hire” politicians with our votes as we hire doctors, plumbers, lawyers, teachers, police officers, or builders; but then we leave them bereft of supervision, to get on with “their” business, in reality our own, as they see fit!

For who would walk off the job for decades and not expect to return to a site on which those immediately involved had transformed the requirements to suit themselves?

Yet that is exactly what we have done with our government. We have left our representatives on their own and their job's requirements have been transformed.

It is not our political class that has transformed the requirements of its assignment on its own, but the political process, evolving to suit the needs of individual constituencies, of special economic interests, that has transformed our government and transferrd our sovereignty to those special interests as a matter of course.

Our American legal system is adversarial. The ideal is that opponents before the bench argue their own briefs and attack their adversary's so strenuously that in the end the chaff will have been consumed and the kernel of truth alone remain.

Our political system has been built by lawyers, so naturally it shares this adversarial architecture with our legal system. The various special interests are imagined to come and argue their cases before the people, to be be opposed by the people's representatives, and in the end the chaff inherent in all of their arguments will be consumed leaving, if not the truth, a hard fought and workable compromise.

Today those who were to represent the people's interests have been bought by special interests and represent those interests exclusively. "Our" representatives are merely the outsourced employees of those special interests. Having won their campaigns funded by the special interests "our" representatives show up for work upon their election and are greeted by stacks of legislation written by their employers. Their only job is to enact it.

There are no longer two adversarial sides, the special and the people's interests, as envisioned in our system's original design, but one. We the people of the United States of America are no longer represented at all by our American political class.And it is ourselves who have allowed this happen.

We have forgotten the three r's : rededication, reform, redirection..

What has happened to our system is just what happens to every complex system without the guiding hands of men and women: it has evolved a life of its own, independent of our original requirements of it.

All of our fears are rooted in the intuition we all share, that we have lost control of our government. But regaining control is as easy as “just doing it”, for our Constitution remains essentially intact. We need only to exercise it and ourselves in our pursuit of self-governance.

There are two areas that require our immediate attention :

1. Our Republic: The funding of political campaigns must be radically reformed. Not only do the vast sums expended on political campaigns ensure that some constituencies are “more equal” than others at the end of a campaign, but the massive amounts of money expended during campaigns goes for image building, for advertising, and advertising is based on disinformation; it is the art of deflection, of insubstantiation, of smoke and mirrors. So our present campaigns leave the issues whose solution ought to be the job description of the prospective candidates untouched, unspoken, unargued by design. Substituted in the place of rational discussion are “image” and “value” and “judgment”. All sizzle and no steak, our elections have no chance of effecting rational choices among well-defined alternatives. They are instead professional wrestling matches wherein we pick “our” side and root for the defeat of the other, just for the sake of the contest. We have allowed ourselves to be bought with bread and circus. Such political work as does get done is in fact counter to our interests, is performed instead in the interests of the corporate and plutocratic powers that control the political ad-campaigns. There are real issues at stake, issues of life and death, of health and happiness. This is neither a game nor a play and there is no deus ex machina to put things right in the end. We must govern ourselves again, wrestling not with the image advertised by the one side or the other in the “contest” but with the issues themselves and we must make the decisions ourselves for it is we who will bear their consequences.
2. Our underlying Democracy : The mechanism used to initiate legislation, to review legislation, and to recall errant executives and representatives must be explicitly replaced in our hands, in the hands of the people. Unless and until our sovereignty is re-established and exercised we will not be able to remedy the problems of our republic and thus to break out of our present, sinking gyre.

We must ask ourselves some serious questions :

1. What has happened to the mass-murderers of 9/11? Are they capable of striking again? What might we do or stop doing that might make such attacks less likely? What have we done to anticipate, identify and thwart such attacks in the future? How can it be that the multi-trillion dollar “Department of Defense” failed so utterly and miserably to defend us the only time we were actually attacked on our own soil since the war of 1812? Who are the people who must bear the ultimate responsibilty for the mass-murders of 9/11? Were the mass-murders of 9/11 in fact known to be in progress beforehand and allowed to go forward to further the other, aggressive aims which have thus far constituted our nation's response to them?
2. How can we return Iraq to the Iraqis? Afghanistan to the Afghans? Pakistan to the Pakistanis? Surely it is our occupation, directly and indirectly, of those countries that incites the daily, world-wide slaughter that has become the mainstay of world news reports. What can we do or stop doing that might give peace a chance in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Pakistan?
3. How can we stop fueling the Israeli/Palestinian war in the Middle East that has killed so many innocents on both sides over the past four decades? The war that is the root cause of so much of the despair that fuels the violence against innocents to begin with? Why can we not simply stop the flow of US money and arms to Israel that enables its continuance, that has perpetuated the conflict for more than forty years?
4. How can we stop worrying ourselves sick over healthcare? Why cannot the “sole remaining superpower” ensure that its own citizens are not worried to death by the burden of health-care?
5. How can we have failed to deliver the world's best, free public educational system? Can we not see that two or three generations' application of the world's best education will make not just a quantitative but a qualitative change in the aspirations and understanding of our grandchildren and great grandchildren?
6. How can we not leave the world a better place than we found it? How can we arrest the degradation of our environment and then husband and restore it? Generation after generation?
7. How can we not reorder the disposition of our public assets to ensure an end to mega-tonnage of death and destruction, an end to the new realm of robotic warfare here on earth and in the heavens above, and instead foster the construction of, not paradise on earth, but its closest approximation.
8. How can we re-balance our federal budget? Was it really just ten years ago that we were in surplus? Can we really continue to burn our children's and grandchildren's legacy? Where would we be today if our parents and grand parents had done that to us?
9. How can we get off of the fossil fuel treadmill, the source of our world's thermal disruption as well as the unspoken rationale for our nation's present wars of aggression?
10. How can we beat back the fear that sets us at each others' throats? How can we not see that cooperation, that putting one foot in front of the other and marching toward the solution of our problems has worked before and will work now, again? How can we recover the sense of community, the common sense of identity and purpose that led us to land Americans on the moon in pursuit of excellence and knowledge and adventure? Can we not each of us accept all of the rest as family and realize that we share the same destiny, wily-nily?

We can do all these things of course. We might start by turning off our TVs. We might start by just disregarding the daily hype, rancor and nonsense that the salesmen pour out at us to keep us at an emotional peak, always willing to buy on impulse, always willing to act unreasonably.

Our problems arise not from some source of unspeakable evil but from our inattention to business. The banality of evil is as shameful as it is stunning. Each special interest presently gets its way, blinders firmly emplaced to shield its eyes from the damage done to the fabric of life and society as a whole by the realization of its own selfish requirements.

All we need do is exercise once again our good, common sense. All we need do is insist on replacing sovereignty in our own hands and then to re-establish the primacy of humanity in our nations affairs.

Then we may deliver to those who would serve us a full and public delineation of the problems that face us and the principles of their prospective solutions. No more getting by on appeals to apple pie and motherhood, to god and country, to terror and fear.

America is not a Christian nation and neither is it a Muslim, or Jewish, or Hindu, or Buddhist, or Confucian, or atheist nation. Our founding fathers circumscribed government, limited its jurisdiction to the realm of the mundane, to the world of questions with answers.

The most imporatant questions, those without answers, will always remain in the realm of religion and belief.

We ourselves must supply the right answers to the answerable questions. No one will do it for us.

Our political class is allied with its patrons against us. We must take back our sovereignty, reform and redirect our nation, and rededicate ourselves to our own human self-interest, for it is in no one else's interest to do so.