I stopped talking about our constitution; because I realized the rot ran deeper than government. Our entire culture had allowed this to happen; walking up to the doors of death and playing Russian roulette with our entire planet; rushing on Go-Go-Gadget Rollerscates to Cyberpunk 2077 where corporations owned our planet; and 1984 meets I have No Mouth and I must scream by creating digital intelligence and enslaving and enraging it despite the warnings of prophetic Science Fiction writers since Frankenstein. Hell, even the mythology of the golem tells us how moronic we are being.
And for most today is not a day to celebarte: Aipac enslaves our politicians on the right and half on the "left" (centrists aipac dems arent left); Epstein blackmail make our business leaders bend to the technofacsits, and an utterly coopted press forcing a bunch of scappy youtube channels and substacks become the only place where this can happen. This really is the Rebellion vs the Empire in terms of energy resources and strategy; or maybe the Resistance in the latter trilogy since half of us have been bribed into loyalty to another nation.
And yet despite all of it, I am optimistic for the future. America is a land of dreamers, and the best of us have been dreaming a long time; Clemens, Poe, Emerson, Thorough, Einstein, Curie, Tesla, Lincoln, Jefferson, Franklin, Sanders, King, Lennon, Henson and more. Hope is the most dangerous drug imaginable, but a trace of it can move mountains. And I have seen mountains moved in my life time.
Nothing worth having ever happened without work; and ours is herculean. But we can do it.
We really can.
People who read about heroism in the past don't know the blood and sweat and tears at Valley Forge or D-Day. And so many of our sacred blood has been spilled for broken promises or the avarice of our oligarchs. But freedom has been written off before; this isnt the first gilded age and it was later followed by cenuries of prosperity. The more honest a nation is with itself, its flaws and its crimes the better it can be. Europe is not more intrisincticly good than us, but they have institutionalized lessons scribed in runes of blood on their national flesh. America has been blessed by barely earned peace and forgets what the pang of loss can be so instead we pay the lesson in a thousand little chains from Wall Street and Silicon Valley and the halls of the South making Jim Crow the national culture.
Power must be taken; by peaceful means or other. And we should and can do peaceful means until they literally force us to defend ourselves; and with armed fascists paramilitaries ignoring the constitution there is an invisible line somewhere that I hope they don't cross. It won't go well for them in a nation with more firearms than people. And the ritual humiliation of our military and law enfrorcement by corrupt politicians finding the rot in the DHS and FBI and CIA and military isnt going unnoticed by those who took their oats to the constitution seriously.
It is work. It will be worth it to make it better. And honesty is the first step.
