Government and Citizenship
By Charles Sullivan
04/03/07 "ICH"
-- -- I have been thinking a great deal of late about
government and its relationship to the citizenry. It should be
obvious that any government that claims to be of the people and
for the people must also serve the people. Yet it is clear that
the current government does not serve the people—it exploits
them. When sixty-four percent of the citizenry demand an end to
the U.S. occupation of Iraq and the government responds not by
withdrawing its troops, but by escalating the war, that
government cannot be a government of the people, for the people,
and by the people. What is it then?
It is a government of the wealthy; a corporate, fascist
government of the highest order. It is a government that spurns
ordinary people and uses its power against them. It is the
opposite of the kind of representative government it purports to
be. It extorts tax dollars from its citizens and sends them to
do the bidding of the very wealthy under the pretense of
patriotism and national defense. It is, in fact, using citizens
against citizens and plundering the national treasure with the
tools of empire, class warfare, and imperialism.
Every military weapon that is manufactured and put in use
diminishes us as a nation. Militarism enriches the defense
contractors and the plutocracy by robbing the citizens. It
deprives us of an urgently needed national health care system,
better schools, decent jobs that provide living wages; and it
exacts social and environmental costs that are incalculable, all
of which are important to ordinary Americans.
We do not have a government based upon the rule of law or
equality, as evidenced by its own history—even its recent
history, as we saw in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina; or in
the dilapidated military hospitals across the land where
limbless soldiers cannot get the health care they so desperately
need, and lie waiting and wasting in filth and ruin. These are
the troops the government purports to care so much about. Broken
men and women from combat zones are the worn out tools of empire
builders. Like unwanted toys, they are used up and no longer
played with by our rulers; an embarrassment, something to be
warehoused safely from public view.
The president and his minions behave as if they are above the
law. Laws apply to his subjects, but not to the King who thinks
he is the supreme ruler.
They want us to believe that we support our troops by placing
magnetic ribbons on our vehicles and by prominently displaying
American flags. But Walter Reed and other military hospitals
across the land reveal what we really think about our military
veterans in ways that cannot be offset by patriotic trinkets and
jingoism. The government honors them in patriotic language even
as they abandon them in deed.
There is a constant tension that exists between the government
and the governed. The people are disorganized and the government
is doing everything in its power to keep them that way. Nearly
all of the public good that was ever accomplished in this
country came as the result of public outcry for justice, a cry
that brought people together in mass to organize against gross
injustice. That is how chattel slavery was finally abolished. It
is how civil rights were won. Organized mass civil disobedience
and protest brought the Viet Nam war to an end.
When enough good people unite in common cause, government is
forced to hear their voice and meet their demands. I should note
here that it is only unjust governments that have anything to
fear from its citizenry. Democratic governments do not treat its
own citizens like terrorists by trying to quell dissent or
spying on them. Nor do they imprison those who disagree with
them and uphold a higher code of ethics and conduct than them.
The Constitution, the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of
Independence—all of them important and eloquent documents—did
not bring about the most important achievements in American
history. Ordinary citizens did all of that by organizing and
demanding justice. Freedom isn’t won in the courts or secured in
documents; it is won in the streets through the deeds of an
aroused and just citizenry. Just laws can be written but it is
ordinary people who must bring them to life and give them
meaning. Integrity must live in the hearts of the citizenry.
Justice is not a noun—it is a verb that must be driven by
principled action.
An alert, thoughtful, rational, conscientious citizenry; an
aroused citizenry, is the worst nightmare of tyranny. That is
why the government is spying on its citizens. That is why posse
comitatus and habeas corpus were revoked by the Bush regime and
enabled by a timorous congress. It has nothing to do with
fighting terrorism. The government is keeping an eye on us,
looking for signs of trouble. They must keep us from coming
together, from organizing against the established order just as
radical unions are kept out of the work place.
Most of the citizens of the United States, while quite naïve,
are, I believe, good and decent people who play by the rules.
The majority of them, whose voices are rarely heard above the
noise of the corporate media, operate with a sense of justice
and fair play. Most of them would not knowingly cheat a neighbor
and only a small percentage, actually a fraction of one percent
of them, would murder a neighbor. It is their naiveté, their
ignorance and trust in authority that gets them into trouble.
Conversely, the government has a murderous history, a long
record of criminality, and a track record of lying and deception
that any sociopath would envy—especially in its present
incarnation under George Bush and Dick Cheney. It has a lot to
answer for. When violence is the first resort of a government,
the people have no business referring to it as a democratic
republic. They must offer resistance to it. They must bring it
into line with the values and code of ethics of the citizenry.
Few would argue, no matter what political stripe they wear, that
the current government bears no more resemblance to the
citizenry than it does to the socio-economic demographics of the
population as a whole. Thus the vast majority of us have
government without representation. It is government that does
not serve the people, but treats them as its servants.
If we are to see improvement, we must stop acting as if we are
living on the plantation and take personal responsibility for
what the government is doing in our name. This will require
organized resistance beginning at the community level and
spreading outward. It all begins with the personal choices we
make. Ultimately, it will require global solidarity to meet a
threat that is also global in extent.
Charles Sullivan is an architectural millwright,
photographer, activist, and free-lance writer residing deep in
the hinterlands of West Virginia. He welcomes your comments at
csullivan@phreego.com.Click here
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