Enslavement Or Freedom
When we come into this world through the birth canals of our respective mothers there is no menu of choices afforded to us in regards to what nationality, race, sex, or for that matter, what time period we are slipping into.
We simply open our little eyes take that painful first breath and suddenly we’re part of something much bigger and more complex than our little brains can yet process. We are not concerned in the slightest with politics, sexual orientations, global warming, criminal justice, war, corporate negligence or democracy. Our focus is on finding food, warmth, and comfortable rest. And so it will be for the foreseeable future.
We don’t know, for instance, that our respective government is issuing us the equivalent of a serial number, or that actuaries are calculating the longevity of our lives so as to arrive at estimations for knowing how much more national debt can be assumed based on our future taxable earnings.
A debt that we will inevitably pay throughout the vicissitudes of our entire lives, till death do us apart. It will be much later when we learn that we are members of a society in a particular nation that is sustained by a social contract known as a constitution. And even later still when we learn that said contract is enforceable under the penalty of death, against us, not it, and that said constitution affords us certain inalienable rights to life, liberty, property and the pursuit of happiness. Freedoms that include religions, marriage, personal and political affiliations, whether or not to have children, whether to serve in the military, choose a particular profession, or, for that matter, choose to bear arms, or speak out against it all.
The constitutions of this and many other nations afford us these stated rights as a matter of principle, which, when looking abroad at other parts of the world, can leave us feeling fortunate and privileged to have been born into a nation that is democratic and free.
What the Constitution, i.e., contract, doesn’t explicitly tell us is that said rights are entirely theoretically and dependent upon our ability to either pay for them, or be in a position of social, legislative, judicial, executive or corporate power so as to make an exchange of value or influence to acquire them, as a right, yes, but at a price.
The unwritten contractual addendums of the Constitution press upon us the importance of personal wealth, fame, or membership in one of the four branches of national power—executive, legislative, judicial, or corporate—so as to ensure our collective access to the promises made to us on the piece of parchment that is our constitution.
Financial resources determine our availability of medical interventions, legal assistance, education, and will likewise determine quality of life factors like housing, transportation, or, most important of all, whether we are pursued or protected by the militarized police forces that patrol and occupy our streets. And at the center of this constitutional dilemma that determines whether our rights are theoretical or actual is simultaneously the problem of impunity.
We have all seen and felt it. Because we live in a society where certain members are given carteblanche so as to step outside the boundaries of the rulebook and pursue personal or corporate agendas without the governing limitations of the very laws that we hold up as sacred to who we are as a nation.
We all remember a recent presidential candidate boast to the world that he could shoot someone dead on Fifth Avenue without consequence. Who amongst us doubted him?
We have religious clerics and politicians telling us to do the right thing and “be law abiding citizens!” when they themselves walk around and skirt the law as though it were a puddle on the street. For how long did wealth, fame and political influence protect the likes of Weinstein, Epstein or Ailes from being held to the same laws and standards as the rest of us?
To say that justice prevails because they were eventually held accountable, to some extent, for their actions is a mockery of justice. It’s also scapegoating, allowing a few sacrificial lambs to be slaughtered to appease the masses while doing almost nothing to address the underlying causes of their behavior and crimes.
Beyond the preferential treatment afforded to the rich, famous and powerful, the same impunity exists with correctional officers, police, prosecutors, elected officials, clerics, and the military who all operate, to one extent or another, outside the confines of the law. Have we forgotten Gitmo or the countless C.I.A. blacksites where men and women are judged, sentenced, tortured or executed at the whims of a governmental bureaucrat with qualified immunity?
Have we overlooked the estimated forty-thousand who are wrongfully convicted of crimes they did not commit every year? These are tragedies committed daily by the very people charged with pursuing justice on our behalf, but who time and again choose their careers and personal interests over your or my constitutional rights.
They wield the sword of Lady Justice without consequences or conflict and still have the audacity to say that we have the best criminal justice system in the world. Maybe for those who can afford to buy or rent those rights, that just may be the case. But there are more of us who can’t afford it than those who can. And if we are in a subclass of citizenry without constitutional protections or rights, why then do we defend a nation that does not defend us?
We all remember the timeless words of JFK, imploring Americans with, “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country!” Well, perhaps both questions need to be asked. Because if the country and its government no longer represents the interests of its people, then what good is the contract and piece of parchment that binds them?
What is a marriage without mutual vows, if not tyranny? The impunity of today is manifest in an imperious government that is unaccountable and corrupt. The founders of this nation aimed to bring about a representative government that exists to protect and preserve the rights of its people.
Yet, the modus operandi of modern day politicians is a practice of profit over-principle that leaves the majority of us—those of us who are either unable or unwilling to pay to play with the currencies of money or exerted influence—without representation. The facade of America projects a certain desirability for the world to see and yearn for from a distance, all the while masking the constraints and oppressions that we experience.
For a government to be truly representative and effectively guarantee liberty and equality for its people, the people that it governs must all be subjected to the same laws. There cannot exist an immunity for some at the expense of others. Because a constitution is more than the notions and aspirations of dead men that holds us together. It is a bargain struck between the people for the people.
The taxes that we pay and our willful adherence to laws is a tribute that we pay in exchange for the rights and protections guaranteed to us by the Constitution. But, what we are living in this nation is not that. Rather, our reality is proof positive that constitutions can also be instruments of tyranny.
When a constitution or a legislative, elected body provides for certain inalienable rights and a corporate appointed, unelected body can come along with twisted logic and legalese and selectively decide who gets access to those rights, that’s tyranny. Take for example how in 2010 the unelected members of the Supreme Court decided in Citizens United v. Federal Elec. Comm.
that corporations are people and their voice is their money, thereby granting corporations First Amendment protections to use that voice to influence elections. Which in many ways was the death toll of democracy. The Justices who did this, overturned more than a century of legal precedence and legislative efforts to keep the reigns of government in the hands of the people for the people.
We live in a world where corporations easily control four-fifths of the global wealth and none of them are democratically operated They run by the equivalent of imperial decrees and despotic whims. Their existence depends on invented, economic models of unlimited and unsustainable growth at the expense of the very natural resources that we humans need to survive.
They collectively control the media and entertainment we consume, the commercially available sustenance we eat, the platforms and networks that we use to communicate, the limited energy reserves that we use to heat and illuminate and power our homes and modes of transportation. From the clothing on our backs to the shoes on our feet these autocratic, corporate bohemeths of profit-over-principle and unsustainable growth control with impunity the very strings that tug at our lives. Is this, therefore, a nation worthy of our national anthem?
I am reminded of a young politician from 1755 by the name of Pasquale Paoli. He led a rebellion against the Republic of Genoa, and in doing so drafted a ten page constitution. He expressed his belief in liberty and a conviction that people should have certain inalienable rights. And that if there rights prove to be nothing more than “a laughable fiction,” then no person would have a legitimate reason to defend said nation. Are we not, now, in this very position?
I hope not.
But beyond hope we owe it to ourselves to scrutinize the very piety and reverence that tethers us to a constitution that may very well now be the tyranny that enslaves us. Let us not be afraid to question probe and analyze the heart and essences of our loyalties. We are not animals of burden. We are free men and women, and because of which, when we hear the crack of the whip, instead of cringing, we turn to see who dares to crack that whip.
Because we are an extension of our nation and our nation must be an extension of us. And that whip, by right of the collective blood that has paid the ultimate price for it, belongs to us—not the corporate benefactors and overloads that wield it. They use their media empires and apparatuses to feign reverence for deeply held constitutional, American values when all along their true reverence belongs to another piece of paper, one that isn’t constitutional but stained nonetheless with the same amount of blood: The dollar bill. Are we a nation of greedy opportunists, or righteous extensions and benefactors of the dead men whose notions and aspirations inspired the Bill of Rights?
Maybe when we take an honest look at ourselves we see that there is a little bit of both in us. We are opportunistic, yes, but we also believe in a self-governed republic of free men and women with equal rights to life, liberty, property and the pursuit of happiness. And because of which, we are guided by much more than just hope. We are guided by the inevitability of a just and moral victory, sustained by our unwillingness to be or settle for anything less than what we know ourselves to be.
There are ways to change the current realities of our populace controlled by profit-over-principle, corporate overlords. Some say civil war. Others say that some kind of global catastrophe or apocalyptic end-of-times war. Both of which are nothing more than ideas peddled to us, by the very overlords who we know to be illegitimate, as a fear tactic.
Without a doubt the foothold that the U.S. has on the global stage is slipping. It has been for decades. By the minute China becomes more powerful, independent and willing to openly defy U.S. leadership. Same as Russia. New currencies are being invented. Currencies not controlled by the U.S. Treasury, and the writing is most certainly on the wall: We the People of the World want our economies unshackled from the dollar and the ever-shifting whims of U.S. policy. Probably because more nations than ever before no longer believe in the propaganda that the guiding light of this nation is democracy, peace and global prosperity.
Too many nations have been on the receiving end of Shock Doctrine policies aimed at destabilizing nations through war, economic pressures, puppet dictatorships, or the more subtle attacks of relentless propaganda for purposes of profit. There are too many damning, declassified documents showing a historical tendency of one administration after another pursuing agendas of Corporate gains over human dignity and those tedious human needs of water, food, shelter, air and liberty.
Capitalism is no longer a novelty penned by Adam Smith in the eighteenth century. It is a living, breathing, corporate monstrosity of efficiency for the sake of efficiency at the expense of humanity. It is not a person deserving of constitutional rights.
At best it’s an ideology of believing without evidence that a free market of converting humanity into a line item on a spreadsheet called labor is the best approach towards the survival, evolution and propagation of our species.
When in all reality it is nothing more than a series of lifeless equations where people are considered inputs alongside the very limited raw materials of this planet. Where the calculated output is the enslavement of most to the compounding benefit of the few.
I am not suggesting that we renounce production, or ideas of free market trade and ingenuity. Nor am I suggesting that we trade one known ism for another like communism, socialism or objectivism. I’m simply pointing out that the current business-as-usual approach to a global economy is not sustainable. Adam Smith’s capitalism has brought us through a great deal of technological advancement and progress.
But, the cost of that progress has brought us to a point of progression where the choices now before us are the very ones simultaneously tied to the survival of this planet. Changes have to be made and potentially another-ism invented so as to carry us through the next millennium. And in this process of reinventing the basis and order of our economy, we must decide who will serve whom.
Are we going to serve the egomania of corporations, or are they going to serve the entirety of us? The simple truth is that the status quo can’t be defended. Not with facts. It can only be defended with guns. We know this, but we fear the consequences of asking, much less demanding, that our democracy be returned to us.
Many fear that if we challenge the government’s agenda or attempt to hold it accountable to the rule of law, that we will find ourselves exiled or labelled as a domestic terrorist, extremist, or anti-government. We’ll be labelled as Antifa, Q-anon or neo something-or-other. It’s a standard governmental approach of turning We the People into enemies of the state.
Because depending on how a person’s comments are twisted out of context almost anyone could be considered an extremist in word, deed, thought or association. But if we are to take back our democracy these threats must be confronted with defiant resolve.
Maybe I’m just an eternal optimist. Being that I am currently a statistic of the impunity that this government unleashes on those who try to hold it accountable to the rule of law.
The police, the elected prosecutor and judge who collectively and maliciously stripped me of my constitutional rights so as to secure an illegal conviction, and then handed me over to militarized government agents trained to respond with the utmost degree of violence, did so without any concern for consequence or retribution.
I would not wish what I have lived on my worst enemy. But if we don’t demand a moratorium on governmental and institutional violence, to include the police brutality and shootings of unarmed people, the torture in the prisons, the civilians killed in the nation’s endless wars abroad, the unknown victims of governmental blacksites where human rights and due process don’t exist, then we don’t deserve the moniker of free men and women.
Just like people, a nation can sometimes grow to despise the youthful naïveté from which we came. Are we naive to believe what the founding fathers of this or any other nation believed that our Constitution rightfully expressed the very highest of our potential and ideals?
Are we more than a conglomeration of profit-and-loss statements to be tabulated and accounted for? I recently read something attributed to Winston Churchill, that “success is not final.
Failure is not fatal. It is the courage to continue that counts.” So, this is a plea to the people to stop listening to the representatives and extensions of an apparatus that is not accountable to us or our collective interests. It is past time for us to remind ourselves that even though there was no menu of choices provided to us at birth, our interests extend beyond our personal comforts.
We are no longer new borns and ignorance is no longer bliss. The choice before us now is what it has always been: enslavement or freedom. And so it will be for the foreseeable future.
Thank you for reading and supporting MYLIFEplus25. Look out for next week’s substack publication: Rogue Code..