I Find These Truths To Be Self-Evident
A Reminder of the Goals Our Founding Documents Have Set For the American Citizen.
When the colonies that became the United States declared independence from the United Kingdom, they did so with a document that contained no short supply of ideals from the Age of Reason. Thomas Jefferson, the brilliant statesman and future President, included in his Declaration of Independence phrases like all men are created equal and the Right of the People.
When George Washington fought in the Revolutionary War, it was for those inalienable rights. And when the thirteen colonies signed a Constitution, it began we the people, and they did so to promote the general Welfare. But when it came time to define The People, those that ran the country ultimately left out more people than they included; women, minorities, and non-land-owning white males.
The same Founding Fathers that created this country also created the Electoral College as a safeguard against the very people they intended to include in their democracy. The same Founding Fathers debated over what fraction of a whole person to count slaves as. The country may have been founded on one principal of all men are created equal, but it acted in ways entirely opposed to that ideal.
The years since the adoption of the Constitution have not fared well for that ideal. It would be almost a century before our peculiar institution would be ended, but not without the bloodiest war to ever be waged on our own soil. Whole states seceded to the Confederacy; brothers fought one another with the specific purpose of denying men and women their inalienable rights. Ultimately, the United States won an unwinnable war by ruthlessly slaughtering its own people.
It was the late 19th and early 20th centuries that saw the rise of Worker’s Rights unions and Women’s Rights organizations. But it wasn’t until 1920 that all American women had the right to vote. Landmark Civil Rights bills and Supreme Court decisions would come forty years later that would integrate schools and try to stop institutional racism.
But by 1976, the Bi-Centennial of the Declaration of Independence, the nation still struggled to grasp with its original foundational ideal that all men are created equal. Because like the men 200 years earlier, America would still be a victim of cognitive dissonance, not realizing that it had failed to reach its own ideals.
In 2014, America is still failing to hold up to that dream of a nation where all men are created equal. 21st century politics have ensured a future in which the American people are less and less equal.Democracy on a whole has failed. Since the election of 2000, it has become clear that no longer does each vote count. The Electoral College chooses the victor, not the popular vote. Gerrymandering has rigged the local political system so that districts go uncontested, sometimes for years. Add on top of that the repeal of the Voting Rights Act and the repeal of sections of the Campaign Reform Act by the Supreme Court. While the former has allowed some of the most prohibitive voting laws literally taking away the rights of American citizens, the latter allows companies to flow money into campaigns effectively swinging elections in the companies favor.
Elsewhere, there still rages a battle over whether or not Lesbian, Gay, Bi-Sexual, and Transgender people have the right to live their lives as they choose. The conversation seems like an echo of those early civil rights debates. The LGBT community and friends fight not only for marriage rights, but also for rights not to be discriminated in the workplace, for equal protection under United States law. They’ve even adopted the equal sign as a symbol of their goals.
And after the Great Recession we face income inequality worse than it has been in a hundred years. Educated Millenials, the generation that is approximately in their mid-twenties to mid-thirties, find themselves unemployed at a higher rate than the same age group that experienced the Great Depression in the 1930s. In most places, the minimum wage does not cover cost-of-living expenses. Women are still paid a lesser rate than men, and are less represented among high-ranking officials in business and politics.
America does not need another revolution, but a revolution of thought. We are not a nation where all men are created equal, but a nation that strives towards that goal. Where every single citizen regardless of his or her age, gender, sexual identification, race, nationality, or wealth is treated equally as every other citizen. And as American citizens, we are imbued with a Right of the People, such as the right to vote in fair elections. But we cannot have a truly fair election until all American citizens have an equal right to vote, and until districts aren’t rigged to favor one political party over another.
The national conversation must once again turn towards how we can promote the general Welfare of the people and how we can ensure the rights to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. The Bill of Rights, as great as any rights giving document can be, does not succeed until there are no limits to whom it protects. Our freedoms are only as strong as to how well they protect the least represented.
Americans should be proud to fight for this ideal, it is under the flag of equality that we must all take shelter. This is the platform upon which we became a nation. While others cite the Founding Father’s struggle against taxation, we must remember that it was not the taxation, but the without representation that bothered them. It was their belief then that all should be represented, and that is our belief now. We must take these lessons from our past, and build on them to include an ever-growing array of Americans, and actively strive toward the goal that was set for us. In order to achieve that goal we must work together, for United We Stand, Divided We Fall.