When in the course of direst human tribulation, it becomes clear to all the world that the rights a people naturally deserve to enjoy by virtue simply of being human have been repressed and usurped by the very government charged with preserving and protecting those rights, it is incumbent upon those thus affected to act in common accord to reverse the course of their oppression and restore what is rightfully theirs.
That a society claiming the stature and standing of Representative Democracy, in which government charged with serving the public interest and securing the rights of the people under its dominion instead abuses, threatens, and intimidates those it is expected to serve, and in the course of so doing denies them their rights, their identity, their national pride, and their sense of civic pride and commitment, should in response undertake actions to escape and counteract such malfeasance, requires that the sources of society’s discontents be expressed and explained in justifiable language unequivocally clear to all, lest society’s members be subjected to false accusations of sedition, insurrection, and treason, which they inevitably will by the government in power.
To prove the case for assertive public action, let these revealed Truths be submitted to a candid world for purposes of justification:
The People themselves, let it be noted, are willingly complacent in their knowledge of and appreciation for the idealized superiority of democratic governance that has been bestowed upon them. Ignorant of and indifferent to civic responsibility, they have become alienated from government and from one another, a society divided against itself in danger of disintegration, where loyalty to a self-aggrandizing monarch commands more allegiance than adherence to the once-galvanizing ideas of the Constitution.
The presidency is the crucible for concentrated power and misappropriated authority worthy of the monarch or dictator this country originally sought to escape and delegitimize at the time of its founding. The highest offices of the presidency are filled with sycophantic presidential loyalists who universally warrant no legitimate claim to the expertise or experience that would justify their place in office. Lacking the skills, knowledge, and talent that would make them worthy of respect in the eyes of the people they ostensibly serve, these officials severely undermine and discredit representative democracy as a superior form of governance.
The Congress, ostensible voice of and representative of the people, has forsaken its responsibilities for dutiful popular representation and institutional integrity independent of the executive branch of government. Its members, shamelessly elitist, are divorced from the publics they are charged with serving, and committed to the perquisites and prerogatives of acquiring and holding office at the expense of their obligations for governing, and fully willing to relinquish their institutional prerogatives and individual pride and integrity for the blessings of a strongman head of state.
The judiciary, like the Congress, is a severely weakened and compromised institution, increasingly unable and unwilling to serve as an effective check on executive overreach or Congressional dysfunction. At its highest level, it has been totally politicized and neutered, no longer a guaranteed, trustworthy source of responsible judicial review. On the other hand, lower courts remain a sometime source of legal reassurance in opposition to overweening executive action.
Many, if not most, of the fundamental principles that undergird our chosen form of governance stand in various states of disarray, inspiring little public confidence going forward that we can sustain what our founders originally put in place on our behalf. Popular sovereignty itself, ultimate authority in the hands of us, the people, is embattled at best, severely wounded at worst. The rule of law has increasingly given way to the lawlessness of rule by those in power, who use law as a weapon, not as an instrument of justice. Separated powers and associated checks and balances are largely moribund concepts disconnected from the reality of an all-powerful executive. Majority rule no longer reigns, and minority protection is considered by those in power to be a privilege, not a right. Civil liberties as a whole, in fact, are in constant, unrelenting jeopardy. Public accountability has been completely subordinated and sacrificed in the face of pervasive disinformation; and popular consent – the consent of the governed – is uniformly overridden by executive diktat. Civil-military relations have been distorted into an unhealthy and unrecognizable state, with the wholesale politicization of the military by civilian officials.
In light of the foregoing, we therefore, of necessity representing ourselves, the ostensibly powerless Little People in whose hands ultimate power and authority rightfully ought to reside, now take it upon ourselves to reassert our prerogatives and reclaim our rights by acting in place of those we have heretofore naively trusted to represent us, but who have failed in fulfilling their responsibilities and meeting their obligations. That to do so, we commit ourselves unreservedly and without hesitation to taking government back into our own hands, relinquishing unfulfilled and unfulfilling reliance on elected and appointed public officials who are unable and unwilling to shoulder their responsibilities on our behalf. Our civic weaponry for doing so is sheathed in the 1st Amendment to the Constitution: unrelenting, wholesale reliance on free speech; the free press; free, peaceable assembly; and the right to petition government for redress of our grievances.
Let us recommit ourselves to a Novus ordo seclorum before our democracy suffers the slow, painful death that now threatens it.
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