Birds Flying High, You Know How I Feel…

Lately, I find it more and more difficult to come and talk to you here.  It is hard for me to do so without saying at all times that I feel strongly that we have lost our path, are wandering further and further from it, and that our new route leads only to disaster.  And what is hardest for me is the feeling that many of us are the leaders of our departure.

The crisis before us has been well-recounted, and I do not wish to revisit all of it.  But certain things are absolute: Our constitutional rights have been repeatedly abrogated, violated, and removed by our government.  This same government, of and by the American people, has blatantly and openly committed numerous war crimes, and indeed many candidates for the highest political office in the land openly proclaim that they will continue to commit war crimes should they be elected.  This same government, having collected more taxes than any other in history and spent even more than that, also openly states that it can not and will not account for where billions of those tax dollars have gone.  This same government has led our nation into a war which has cost the lives of thousands of Americans, hundreds of thousands of civilians, and has neither success nor victory in sight, yet as every other nation allied with us is withdrawing, our government has escalated our involvement.

As bloggers, all of us have played an important role in bringing these facts to the American people, who have rightly risen in indignation which crosses all racial, social, political and economic boundaries.  We have played an essential role in highlighting how important these actions by our government, a government which we permit to act in our name based on the premise that we ourselves have formed it by contractual agreement in the Constitution, damage the most fundamental nature of what we ourselves are – a nation of free citizens forming a democratic Republic by choice.

Put simply, a United States of America where the government violates its own laws and treaties to commit war crimes, where tax revenues disappear without the people being told of its use, where the government refuses to allow citizens the right to hear evidence against them and tortures them into giving evidence against themselves is a nation with neither meaning nor significance.  In such a United States, we cease to be citizens and become serfs.

If we are no longer a self-governing people, and become the rabble and the ruled, then little else matters.  Preserving Social Security and creating Universal Health Care has no significance in those circumstances.  The Soviet Union claimed to provide health care and retirement benefits to its serfs, lest we forget.  If we are not free citizens ruled by a lawful government, then social programs are only given as long as those who rule us by fiat wish, and for that matter, can be declared given without our actually receiving them.

By now it should be clear to all thinking observers that the loss of legal and reputable government is not the mere creation of a rogue Executive, or of a single political party enamoured of authoritarianism.  The Democratic majority in both houses of Congress has demonstrated that.  They have passed a minimum wage increase, but have not even brought the restoration of habeas corpus or other Constitutional rights to a vote.  They have passed a myriad of spending bills, but have not even considered taking action on the open commission of war crimes.  They have led a half-hearted fight to subpoena persons connected to the scandals of the Justice Department, but have done far less to give the American people an answer to where their tax dollars have vanished to.

A common lament is that this is a failure of the Democratic Party’s leadership.  But it seems more and more clear to me that this failure of leadership is merely a mirror to the failure of the party’s voters and donors.  The leadership cares less than it should because those who vote for them and donate to them care less than they should.  And no where is that failure to care as much as we should as disheartening to me as in the so-called netroots, the bloggers of all spectrums of the political left.

After all, we led the charge of making sure these facts about what our government was doing were known.  We were among the loudest voices proclaiming how significant these actions were, to the very meaning of what being American citizens means.  More than any other category of Americans, we ought to know better than to behave how we are.

Not a day goes by when we are not distracting ourselves and failing to recognize our own success.  Every day, we chose to write and promote other, lesser agendas.  We want to focus on the misdeeds and failures of our health care, to tilt at the windmills of globalized trade and executive pay, to argue about the merits of America’s first female President or black President or a President who will fight for poorer Americans.

What this says to me is that we do not understand what we have unleashed in “people-powered politics”, we do not understand why the issues we claim to believe matter most are not honored as such by our own party and representatives, nor the true precariousness of our current moment in history.

In the world of politics powered by people, Ron Paul is approaching the fundraising of Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney with money given by people who agree on only two things: that we must restore the American Constitution, and that we must have a lawful government.  Those same two beliefs maintain the candidacies of Dennis Kucinich and Chris Dodd.  I have no way of proving this, but I would imagine that the voices of the “netroots” who support the candidacies of Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and John Edwards nearly all agree that the restoration of the Constitution and having lawful government are issues of essential importance.

In Washington, we have been sorely disappointed in the actions of Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader Reid, both of whom are representatives whom we nearly universally thought highly of a year ago.  This is in no small part because of our own confusion and parochial concerns, as we place other issues of lower acclamation ahead of unifying with all Americans who share these values for whatever reasons.  A future where a President Clinton or President Edwards places health care reform or trade reform ahead of eliminating war crimes or restoring due process, and by doing so, fails to achieve the needed momentum to address those issues is frighteningly possible – are not those issues shoved aside during their “debates” for arguments about driver’s licenses and experience?

I will paint you no pictures, but take a moment to imagine America where the next President does not require the government to act lawfully, nor restore to American citizens like you and me our rights.  

It is that potential future that leads me to have difficulty continuing to participate here and in similar venues.  The fundamental issue upon which all other political issues in this country depends is being avoided here, by you and by me.  We do not say, “Of what value is America’s first female Queen, or our first black Archduke?”  And I am unable to not ask, what rough beasts are we, our hour of victory come at last, that we slouch by choice down the road to serfdom?