The real revolution

Is the human race destined to live with the virus of tyranny? Is it truly impossible to create a society where respect, dignity and liberty are the prevailing values, and not greed, selfishness, and power lust?

Even the most cursory glance at history reveals that societies established on high principles, over time, degenerate and falter.  Liberte, egalite, fraternite paved the road to Napoleon; the stirring Jeffersonian sentiment that “all men are created equal” has produced a modern America whose penchant for empire and dominion is no different than that of the British or Romans before them.

We forget — at our peril — that even a perfect law is meaningless to a lawbreaker.  Good laws are only part of what go into making a good society.  A good society also requires a decent and virtuous citizenry that will respect each other and obey just laws.

A law that commands that people respect each other will be useless if those people do not wish to respect each other.

In America today, if people wanted a just society without sexism and racism, without poverty and prisons, without the military industrial complex and its attendant economic principles, they could have it.  The American Constitution, in its current form, protects individual liberty, demands the end of racism and the equal protection of the law.  It protects free speech and the rights of the people against a tyrannical central government.  No new laws are required if people wished to implement a more just governing structure in their society.

But what is required — and what remains the most critical issue in defending the last remnants of a dying republic — is a real revolution amongst every individual citizen herself.  Every person, internally — in her heart and in her head — must look at her own life and her own relationship to her society and her government and seek a different way.

A person who wishes respect to govern at the international level must implement respect at her own individual level.  A person who wants freedom must find and institute such freedom in her own life. A person who wants an end to racism and sexism must tackle those social demons within her own mind and rid them to the best of her ability.  She must change first — because it is abundantly clear that her society and her government will not seek such change by themselves.

For too long Americans have been caught in the co-dependent myth that someone will come and save them.  It was this rush for a savior that led to such widespread support for President Obama, who has not proved himself worthy of any mantle of “change”.

There is no knight-in-shining-armor who will wisk away the decadent corporations or the entrenched elite who impoverish the country and bomb the people of other nations.

A people receive the government they deserve.  The debacle of Hurricane Katrina, the sorrow and tragedy of the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, the slow but steady collapse of internal democracy, the destruction of the environment — the American public has already borne witness to several alarm bells concerning the true state of their society.  If nothing is done, it is because the people themselves do not care for the state of their liberty or the tyranny enacted by their leaders. T he people themselves have lost sight of the democratic values enshrined in their Constitution.

Yet it is eminently possible to return to these principles and return to democracy.  But for this to happen, it requires a change in every individual citizen to rededicate herself to a different way of life.

What this way of life will look like is  unclear, and that is part of the problem — every student of democracy is, at this moment, engaged in a subtle experimentation with the future.

But we also know what would not be included in the future world: racism, sexism, poverty, prisons, religious intolerance, militarism, ignorance. These are the demons that must be vanquished individually — and, truth be told, they will be vanquished socially as well.  This is guaranteed.

There have been enough excuses and enough delusions.  The real democratic revolution can begin right now within the minds and hearts of anyone willing to accept that challenge.  This is the only path to democracy.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 27th, 2007 at 11:47 am and is filed under Alternative Living, Featured Post, Freedom and Democracy and tagged with america, equality, evolution, revolution, struggle. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.