Today, we’re facing the reality that a) we’ll either continue to remain the United States of America, with our Constitution that states “We the People affirm that the government of the United States exists to serve its citizens” and establishes that we’re all equal under the law with inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of wholeness, or b) we can abandon that way of life to wallow and drown in delusional thinking, pathological lying, the development of conspiracy theories and using violence as a means for enforcing one person’s views and needs over another.
Living in a Constitution-based society means we can have different views about what needs to happen and what course of action we need to take. Ideally, we’ll be able to peacefully dialogue with one another, even if we disagree, with respect for our differences. Throughout this process, we can compromise and incorporate what we can agree upon in the moment. This is how we’ve survived as an American community for more than 240 years. Our very way of living in society is based on the premise that “the United States exists to serve its citizens.” Or, in other words, that we treat someone else as we’d want to be treated.
We’ve had our ups and downs regarding our need to assert the rights of each one of us, and we’ve often taken baby steps to move into the light of awareness and compassion in regard to our fellow citizens. We’ve slowly made progress in acknowledging that we’re all equal under the law. We’ve gone from abusing Native Americans, enslaving African-Americans, abusing large patches of immigrant communities, and abusing women by treating them as “less than men” to asserting that we’re all equal and are to be treated with respect and support by having our basic rights and needs met.
Our way of life has involved a commitment to making sure that all have food, shelter and health care, along with equal access to education and equal rights under the law. Oftentimes, we’ve stumbled along the way, but we’ve persisted in our commitment to one another: our commitment to every citizen living a safe, fulfilled life with their essential needs being met and their rights being honoured. Some would say that this is an idyllic description of our national history. I’d say that it has been our steady push ahead to making a better life for members of our American family.
A threat to our sense of caring
Today, this approach to making our American family whole is being threatened, as there are those in government who want to break apart our Constitutional institutions. Instead of working for the good of all people, these folks are only concerned about working for themselves. This is an approach that puts “me ahead of we” in what is said and done. For these folks, their political agenda takes priority over our efforts to support our citizens and the other citizens of the world we’ve committed ourselves to over the years.
This government group’s strategy is to refrain from passing legislation in order to make the Biden administration look weak. This Mega (MAGA) group complains that Biden has done nothing to stop the flow of immigrants from coming into this country, and yet, it’s this Mega group that refuses to fund or support any efforts to find a solution to the problems with immigration.
The leader of this movement is delusional. He’s someone who can’t tell truth from untruth and is intellectually incoherent. It has been said that his behaviour has deteriorated over the years. He now openly supports the use of violence against those who would oppose him. He’s someone who quotes the likes of Hitler about immigrants being poison to the blood of Americans. He’s a racist and a misogynist in his treatment of others. He’s a throwback to Joseph Goebbels, who asserted that if you tell a lie often enough, people will come to believe the lie to be the truth.
The idea that the 2020 presidential election was “stolen” comes to mind as an example of one of the alternative truths he sees as reality. It offers us a glimpse of what our way of life will become in the future, if someone like this becomes dictator (not president) of the United States. We’ll drown in alternative truths and conspiracy theories instead of dealing with reality, and we’ll all suffer as a result.
This person has a certain appeal that attracts those who follow and support his words and ways. Those who support him feel as though they’re being replaced as the dominant force and are being victimized in our political life by non-white members of our community. To appeal to them, this leader presents himself as the champion of those who are allegedly being abandoned and overthrown by human beings who aren’t white. Immigrants have become his repeated targets and the glue that mobilizes his base.
If we elect this person, we’ll go from having a government of “We the people”—a government that exists to serve its citizens—to one through which violence is routinely used as a tool of coercion to achieve what only some people want. We’ve already had certain voting rights taken away from us, and a woman’s right to determine her reproductive health has been stripped away by the Supreme Court when it overturned the 50-year precedence of Roe v. Wade.
Three of the Supreme Court’s members were selected by this person when he served as the 45th President of the United States. Our health as a community is being threatened with the toxicity this one human being spews forth and acts out on an ongoing basis.
The 4 main responsibilities of U.S. citizens
There are two takeaways from any discussion of our nation’s survival in this time of alternative truths and conspiracy theories:
The first is that, thank God, the majority of us haven’t been infected by this person’s perversions of reality. After all, he lost the popular vote in 2020 by seven million votes. Not all voters feel as though they’ve been sold out by virtue of no longer being the dominant white power group they were part of in the past. Today, our society reflects the reality that we’re a multiracial society and that all of us count.
And second, the 14th Amendment (Section 3) clearly stipulates that anyone who has committed an act of sedition is ineligible to run for political office. The people of the United States have seen, with their very own eyes, that this person is guilty of acting and speaking out in support of interfering with an orderly transition from one presidential administration to another.
If the Supreme Court’s members are true to their role as justices whose responsibility it is to support and defend the Constitution of the United States, the Court won’t allow this person (or any other like this person) to run for political office. His only hope in this matter is that those he elevated to the Court are beholden to him and won’t exercise their role as justices—but, instead, support his candidacy for the presidency. In my view, this course of action is an act of sedition on the part of the justices he has appointed to the Court.
Our responsibilities as citizens of the United States, in order to uphold our collective sense of caring, are simple:
- We must vote in the next presidential election.
- We must maintain the life, liberty and wholeness of our human family.
- We must ensure that “We the people affirm the government of the United States exists to serve its citizens,” instead of supporting the promotion of violence or intellectually incoherent conspiracy theories.
- We must treat others as we would want to be treated.
Namaste: The Divine Essence in Me Honours the Divine Essence in You.
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