"That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.--Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government."
Do you govern or are you governed?
Every other question bows to that one. Every fight we are having in our politics is subordinate to the basic debate launched in Philadelphia in 1776, disputed there once again in 1789, when James Madison and the rest of them craftily overthrew the United States government of the time, bloodily contested 150 years ago this weekend on the fields and hillsides of Pennsylvania, fought out by miners in West Virginia, and by steelworkers at the Homestead mills, and by the victims of the Palmer raids and the Red Scares, and the people in Birmingham and Selma, and by the victims of COINTELPRO -- and, yes, in his own way, by Edward Snowden -- and by thousands of other people who go unnamed in history. It is a debate without resolution, a question without any final answer. It is the endless contest to which America -- and Americans -- committed themselves at the country's founding.
Do you govern or are you governed?
It is a question that cannot be avoided. It is the question that commits us to this day as a nation, and as a people, to the ongoing creative act of building and maintaining some sort of a political commonwealth. It is the question that makes of America an ongoing experiment, and it is the question that commits all Americans to active participation in that experiment. It is a question that demands an answer and, by not answering it, you really are. Yes, you are saying, I am governed. It is good that so many of us are charitable in our own private ways to our fellow citizens, but that is not the object of the debate. That is not an answer to the question. The government is the product of our committment to the creation of the political commonwealth. It is that commonwealth's most obvious public manifestation. It is within that government where the debate must be held. It is within that government where the answer to the question must be provided, year after year, generation after generation. If you believe that your government in this country is tyrannical, you must look to your complicity in that tyranny's development. As you are an American, then Mr. Jefferson's paragraph, cited above, leaves you no other good alibi.
Wars end, one way or another. Countries are born of them, or not. But the war of ideas over this question is designed to be as eternal as the birth of the stars. And the battlelines first were drawn here, 237 years ago this week, when lives and fortunes and sacred honors were committed to the notion of raising all manner of hell in what seemed to be as hopeless a struggle as the one George Washington was waging in and around Manhattan at the time. Looking around the country, you can see all manner of hell still being raised -- in Texas and in North Carolina, just to name two places in particular. The war of ideas goes on, over and over again, even though it is designed to have no real resolution. The question is being asked, over and over again, even though it is designed to have no final answer. The struggle is what counts. The asking is what matters. Out of that, and out of that alone, can the commonwealth be created. Through that, and through that alone, can it long survive.
http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/The_Fourth_Of_July
Happy Fourth, Mr. Oats.
And, God bless America.
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