Tuesday, August 12, 2008

Fuel for the fire of conscience.

Within each of us lies a spark of the divine, a spark of something beyond what we are, beyond what we may even be... a spark which, when fanned into flame, may become something beyond our own control, leading us eternally beyond our own reach.

I don't know what to do about all the things I'm writing about. I don't see all the deals and things that happen in back rooms, and I don't have the power to change a damned thing in this god-forsaken world. I do know, with a conscience stronger than any I've ever known before, that things have to change.

I can't even say that I touch the edges of what is going on, or know the breadth nor the depth of the depravity into which we've fallen... but I can say that without change, the depth will only increase.

My life at that point matters not at all, what matters is the future. What matters is the world we leave behind for our children, our grandchildren. Even if we have no children or grandchildren, for our neighbor's child, their grandchild, and their children and children's children.

We, as a people, have been robbed. We've been robbed, not only of who we are, but of the very knowledge of the rights and privileges which we have been granted by a just and powerful god.

The name of this god matters not, the powers are innate in all of us humans, in all men, all women, all children. The color of the skin matters less than the contents of who you are. The past matters less than who you choose to be. And that nature, that divinity, that grace, is given by that omnipotent hand, and cannot be taken by any man, woman, ruler, lawyer, judge, president, or dictator.

We are a people who have a spark of the divine. And we must grasp it, and hold on to it, lest we be cast into the darkness which is prepared for us by those who would bind and rivet upon us the chains of slavery.

It is no less slavery, after all, for being legal. It is no less slavery for being enforced by law rather than lash. It is no less slavery for being slavery by writ and judgment.

I'm not here this time to try to find peace. I'm here to make you mad, to challenge you, and to sear your conscience with a hot iron. I'm here to drain the wounds of lassitude, to cajole you into accepting your divinity, and more... to bring to fire that divine thing which you are.

I am, admittedly, a man of ideals. I am a being who, in full knowledge of the stupidity, arrogance, lethargy, and perfidy of man, dares believe in the goodness, the potential, and the kindness that also inhabits each being. It matters not what you call god... we make what god calls our purpose... matter.

And who are 'they' to deny us this? Who are 'they' to forbid us the right to make ourselves better beings, to claim that we cannot change, to declare in their infamy that they are above even our creator?

Who are they to lie to us for what they have declared to be our own good? Who are they to declare that our dreams don't matter? Who are they to make it impossible to live, impossible to eat, impossible to grow, impossible to care for others?

By whatever power is out there in this universe, I exhort you! I deny their claims to power sufficient to break the rights of others! I deny that their government was ever granted such a power!

We as a people have duties, and in these we have been lax. In these, we have fallen short, and in many cases, fallen completely away. We do not believe our votes count... so we do not vote. We do not believe our votes are counted, so we make it true. We fight more and more for each scrap which comes to our hands, to feed ourselves, our children, and beg to be able to simply continue to work, to eat, to breathe.

We breathlessly listen for the next chant of change, look for some hope in the darkness, and find more and more of our choices are no choice at all. Who the hell are they to grasp our lives in the palm of their hands and squeeze out our substance?

They are men.. no better, no worse than we, save for our grant of power to their office, and insofar as they continue to work for the rights of men, that power is granted. Should they fail to discharge faithfully those oaths and affirmations to which they have sworn... then their power has, and must fail.

Our constitution does not guarantee any rights... it only states what a very few unalienable rights are. It states that the government must be limited, and places those limits upon the government, for the interest of the people.

It is not a grant of rulership, but a grant of servitude. It is a grant of power, subject to the will of the people through their representatives, that the republic cannot deny the rights of any man, by the will of any other.

It is a government based on equality.. not equality of the least common denominator, but equality of spirit, equality of the ability to take the opportunities that they are offered, and to make those opportunities for themselves.

It is also a government subverted by special interests, by corporations, by people seeking power. They fail, however, to realize that such power comes, entirely, by their own servitude to the people.

In the past the Romans kept a slave in the chariots of a returning general, reminding them in the adulation of the crowd that they were only human... We, however, are not slaves, nor should we be, but we should remind them that their position in life makes us no less human, and no different from they, and in proportion to the power wielded, ought to be their devotion to those who grant that power.

Yes.. grant that power. It is the people who cede power to the government, not the government who gives rights to the people. The people are the base, the foundation of all government, of all society. They are the people. Of the people, by the people, and for the people.

But what have they done? They've created systems where they themselves often are not tried for crimes, where the rich can afford the lawyers to become free, and the poor too often are railroaded into their prisons. They've created a surging prison population, and made it a near guarantee that anyone coming from that prison will return. Then they turned the prisons into labor camps in competition with US jobs, one of the largest industries in the United States... but out of sight, out of mind, right? I think not.

The switchboard jobs that used to go overseas go to the prisons now. The Federal Reserve takes our assets, the entire assets of our country, and loans them out to overseas interests, as collateral for a massively ballooning debt. Oil prices rise as faith in our unbacked currency wavers, and this widens the gap between the poor and the rich further, the middle class disappears, and before too long, we're in a classic feudalistic society, where some have.. and others have nothing.

Our food is often tainted, our water equally so, our vehicles poor in quality and prone to breaking down costing more and more for repairs. We put in emission control systems which reduce our total fuel mileage, increasing total burned hydrocarbons in the long run, but making the waste gasses invisible. We gain ability to do more and more science, but our wisdom in the uses of that science wanes.

Part of our nature is to question. Most of science, in fact, is questioning, questioning what is, questioning each other, testing the data and hypothesis, testing the outcomes, and then rehashing it between scientists.. but now we're told we can't question, only accept. We're told that in order to secure our nation, to maintain our security, we have to give up more and more rights, and they'll protect us better with the rights ceded.

But how are we more secure? In the prison system, prisoners are still raped, still beaten, still killed, and they have given up the control of nearly all their rights. So does our nation, we have no guarantee of protection, nor any guarantee of police cooperation or even investigation.


We are left, as we always were, to police ourselves.. and meanwhile have given up in most cases the rights and abilities to do so. For protecting ourselves and our properties, we can be sued, imprisoned... or executed.

For protecting our rights we can now be imprisoned, registered, monitored, tortured, and potentially executed.

After these things, and after so many lies from our government, how can we hope that yet one more program may be for the public good? They claim that all their programs are for the public good, but are they? When we see the prices rising, the people losing more and more, the construction of more places of imprisonment, more and more control being placed on the internet, and even placed on the libraries and the press itself, attacks on political speech, the spraying of people behind a barricade with pepper spray...

How is this the nation for which our forefathers fought? How is it that since the 1940s, since Nuremberg, that we have embraced the very philosophies of totalitarianism which we fought?

How is it that our nation has come from one of the most progressive nations in the world, the most protective of personal freedoms and privacy, with the best factories and schools in the world... to one of the poorest? Yes, you look around, look around well, and see all the things here, how could we be poor? Because our very money itself is imaginary. It doesn't exist. It's worth is measured entirely in the weight of the paper, the bits of ink on it... and that isn't worth much at all, cotton rag fiber and ink.

Is it not because of that very leadership that feels it knows best for us? Is it not because, rather than taking hold of the tiller of the government ourselves through our representatives, that almost none of us have times to show them what the issues are?

At this point... it is on our own heads. And I am as ashamed for myself as for you. Our spending beyond our means, our credit deals, our paucity of life to pursue the next 'big thing' while ignoring our families, our pursuit of pleasure beyond our pursuit of knowledge and wisdom...

Who the hell are we? And why, in the name of whatever God is out there... do we let 'THEM' stand for 'US'?

And when will we realize that all the power that the government claims... is really ours?

When will we realize.. that we are the masters of government, not the other way around?

And when will we awaken, and become angry, and tell them this? When will we look and speak out, shout out in our anger, and tell them this needs to change?

When will we rebuild our nation? It can't come from outside, it is OUR nation. WE have to rebuild it, and return it to the dream which stirred the nation from the ashes of history.

And we must vote, speak, think, question, perceive, study, plan, and research upon the nature of the constitution, and the Federalist papers upon which the arguments were founded.

I don't need to tell you about the lies. You know all about them. You live them in a lot of your life. You exist within them, the society, the money, the credit, the fuel and food prices. You see our people overseas, dying, but we don't shout out that we're hurting here.. we're starving here, that each month the checks less and less cover the bills coming in, and that we know at some point they can't cover those bills.

Should we still let 'them' control the government? Should we continue the mistake, or turn it about into a triumph? Should we play their game, or play our own? Should we continue to be puppets, or choose our own play?

The choice is yours. The rights are yours, and by God and all that is holy... the powers are yours as well. I believe that there is a God, that presides over the destinies of nations, and that right now, he is weeping at our inaction.

He is mourning those that fall before the machine of government that we allow to continue the legal fiction of legislating away those rights and freedoms which ultimately derive not from them, but from ourselves.

And he is mourning, right now, that you are still not angry enough to speak. When will you be angry though? Will it be when we no longer have effective means to resist? Will the change come when they have stationed police in your own home, when your children are turned against you, when the schools teach dogma rather than thinking and learning skills? What then?

I do not know what you will choose.. but my course is more clear than any other course in all of my history. It is a fire that burns inside men, and I choose to let it burn, even if it consumes me. No man can be denied something given him from within, by god or by himself.

And no man can ever truly die, so long as he follows his dream. The body may fall, the corpse may rot away.. but so long as his dream lives on, he is not dead.

So dream your dreams, as I dream my own, and spin the webs like Clothos of old. Though my thread may be cut by the shears of Atropos, the fabric continues, and will be stronger for my dreaming.

This is the part of wisdom, of hope, and of the future.

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