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Our Choice: The Shroud or the Open Covenant

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Message Rafe Pilgrim
It was probably in Poli-Sci 1, I recall being lectured that the proper function of government is to do for a people what they could not do so well by themselves.  Then I look at the government we have today that appears to lurk behind. Some fundamental elements of mass education, it seems to me, need more focus on the Left than they have received.  It is all very well for Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky to describe the horrors of ruthless imperialism and to insist that to be a moral nation We-the-People must refuse to allow it.  Unfortunately, morality is too often defined as what works for one's own group, whether or not it devastates others.  What is needed is more attention paid to the feasibility of these immoral practices.  It is necessary for people to understand that they will not serve to keep us secure at terrible cost.  They will not keep us secure at all. impenetrable shroud that hides its machinations from the public while immunizing itself to citizen influence.

THE (note: not OUR) government  insists in endless war (the details of course "classified") apparently beholden to the weapons makers at the costs of our economic resources, our disgrace in the eyes of the decent peoples of the world community and our future history, and most treacherously of our kids' lives.

The government insists upon the extortionately costly medical system managed by private insurance interests, unlike any other advanced society in the world, putting the citizens' quality of medical care behind thirty-odd other and poorer nations to the gratification of the greed meisters, i.e. our actual masters.

The government awards incompetent, failing and usurpative investment bankers trillions of our national treasure in the face of annual individual executive compensation that exceeds what many citizens will earn in their lifetimes, while at the same time it squirms and endlessly debates the levels and terms of unemployment compensation to aid with scant subsistence for the families of their victims.

The government brutishly muscles its way about the international community in choosing threats over diplomacy, and then reaches out – no – besieges the citizens with the propaganda that our duller minds seize upon and moronically transmute into flag waving, a prime example of which was the "Support Our Troops" maneuver -- the citizens didn't get angry, they bought bumper stickers and affected moral superiority -- while my outrage seethed several notches higher.

And now we have – by God – torture!  Our President announces he will overlook it, or rather dismiss it, so to "look forward."   The Senate Majority Leader proposes – that rather than to investigate the issue, there should be "private hearings" by a Senate committee (perhaps, it is said, to take a year) beyond  the reach of the citizens' ears.  And the chap who authored the "legal" authorization for the torture now sits at high station of our federal "justice" system with a lifetime appointment, with there being apparently no instrument available to the public to unseat a virtual de Sade from our judicial bench.

All too rarely, there is a congressional hearing right out there on TV for the "benefit" of the public.  But – when it gets right down to the really important part there inevitably comes the announcement of the "closed session."  Closed be damned!  This is the most crucial of the citizens' business.  Are we citizens of America or its enemy?

Whereas the government is simply unreachable by the citizens, the opposition to anything it does is either feckless or duplicitous, regardless of partisan persuasion, the Republicans being more stridently self-serving or greed-serving, and the Democrats, while appearing perhaps more modest and reasonable, nevertheless apparently kowtowing to the same masters, considering that precious little remedy has been evident after they regained majorities of both houses in the 2006 election, and now the presidency.  Adding to this is a so called peace-movement that lacks the resolve or the courage, and perhaps the integrity to make any dent in official treachery.  (How was it co-opted?  Perhaps infiltrated?)

So, fellow Americans, where does that leave us mere citizens?  Out in the cold and convinced that we're in good hands?  Or unable to do anything to influence THE government?  Or determined that we will no longer permit a government of arrogance, perverted influence, privilege and exclusion, but will now take back America?

There was a concept that OUR government must be one of "open covenants openly arrived at."  The de-facto government of this once world's oldest democracy has violated the open covenant with the people, and now proceeds behind doors closed to the eyes and ears of 300 million American citizens, for the most part furtively, but at times actually announced by a smug functionary, perhaps a senator, "to protect" the nation and its people.

Protection be damned!  We want our republic back!  Now!

Can we handle that proposition?  You bet!  But only if we the citizens possess and exercise the requisite insight, integrity, effort and courage to demand and to deserve it.

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Rafe Pilgrim, after "a life largely wasted on hard honest work," found himself a jungle of turkey oak, scrub pine and giant palmettos up a dirt road running east of Crystal River, Florida, which neither school busses nor the U.S. Postal Service dare (more...)
 
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