The
United States of America that we grew up in, and in some cases fought
for, no longer exists. I would like to write something stirring in
defense of our Constitution, but it isn’t under attack. It is simply
ignored. Some have proposed that we have a Constitutional convention to
add new amendments. What would that accomplish? Would our present
Federal government respect a set of new amendments when they don’t
respect the old ones? What good does it do to insist on one’s rights as a
citizen, when in fact mere citizenship has lost its meaning? Americans
have no rights officials in Washington feel bound to recognize. Both
Republicans and Democrats overrule majority opinion as a matter of
course. They do not doubt for a moment that they are the best and
brightest, and that our voting franchise is merely an antiquated
inconvenience. My elected representatives represent no one but
themselves. They make war on my culture, my faith, and my security--
then they insult me in front of the elitist media on TV. The executive
branch, the congress, and most of the judiciary have no more respect for
me as a human being than colonial empires had for the most backward and
primitive of their subjects. The elites that live inside the beltway
and in the bubble of academia should try living in Ohio or Missouri for a
few years. “White privilege” isn’t doing all that well in rural West
Virginia. We are here, now, in this country at this time. We are real
people with real lives. We are not statistics in a sociologist’s model,
nor are we third and fourth generation perpetrators from some
politically reconstituted version of history. It is all too obvious that
our most unrepresentative of representative governments neither knows
us nor respects us. They despise us. It is too much to ask us not to
despise them in return.
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