Steal this Essay, It’s No Longer Free
So, like who are we? Are we even anyone anymore? Are we that house divided in two Abraham Lincoln warned us about? Are we a coalescence of factions vying for control over the grand prize of dominion over our domestic enemies every four years? Are we the descendants of the pilgrims who shared a table with Natives on that first thanksgiving or are we descendants of the pilgrims and colonists that orchestrated genocide against the original stewards of this beautiful land?
What is a nation? What are a people? What binds us together? How legitimate are laws of the land? What makes laws legitimate on this land? How many people have to give up on the institution of the United States before that word is just a shell? A nod to history? An experiment failed finally realized?
How many people have to stand and watch as 250 years of precedent and belief in the voice of the people falls apart? How much am I, we, overreacting to actions taken by people who have never had as much responsibility as they have right now in an election amid a pandemic? What will be the story I tell my kids about this time? Will I have kids?
Complicit and complacent.
According to Forbes 55% of Americans were not too confident or not confident at all that the election would be conducted fairly. So, if we don’t even believe in the basis of our democracy what do we believe in? If we don’t believe in the systems that make the United States of America, we don’t believe in the United States of America. We are a constitutional nation brought together by the sanctity of our governance and the process by which that governance is assembled. If we do not believe there is a sanctity anymore, do we believe in our own governance anymore?
Complicit and complacent.
Governing is sacred. It is not a game. It is a responsibility that is miraculously met at times and devastatingly defaulted on at other times. It is active, it is conscious, it is continuous. It is not a series of decisions made along a metaphorical string that ties together push pins holding newspaper headlines to a bulletin board. It is not a collection of data points that can be graphed. A slope that can be found. Governing is state of existence that either is or is not. Individuals either govern or they do not. You cannot turn on the switch and govern. You have to be in every situation enacting the action of governance. You cannot govern for anyone in particular, you cannot govern against anyone in particular. At the exact point governance is consciously directed toward or away from a group of humans or even a single human, the state of governance has changed to the state of coercion, the state of oppression, the state of tyranny, and at this point no freedom is safe.
Complicit and Complacent.
Governing is sacred. If we don’t believe in the systems that make the United States of America, then we don’t believe in the United States of America. If we refuse to govern for all, we are embracing oppression, tyranny, and the jeopardization of freedom. If we stand with our fellow Americans and refuse that their voice may be heard as loud as our own, we cannot say we hold the truth that all men are created equal as self-evident. We cannot read our own founding document declaring our independence without disregarding its first sentence as null and void. We cannot see our own signatures at the bottom of the document. We cannot declare our independence. We cannot declare ourselves the United States of America.
Complicit and Complacent.
It takes work to lead. It takes responsibility to govern. It takes passion to incite. It takes fear to direct. It takes an other to unify. It takes trust to cooperate. It takes honesty to trust. It takes lies to manipulate. It takes humility to listen.
Passion, fear, tribalism, deceit. These will be present in every leader, it is the shortcut, the crutch, the fallback plan. Power is achievable through these tools for anyone that seeks it. These are the four horsemen of the apocalypse that democracy was born to defeat.
Now as we step into this era of compliance and complacency in American politics, have we finally poisoned the well from which we drank all this time? Or have we learned that our democracy is a living thing that needs to be nurtured by civil engagement and respect for the sanctity that comes with governance?
