We reap what we sow

Free trade deals… the national debt… the budget deficit… taxes… campaign finance… Woe is we, say the people - for our Representatives have betrayed us!

The truth is, we have betrayed ourselves.

We have consistently voted against our own best interests by electing and appointing said representatives, enabling them to run roughshod over the American people, and people of the world, at the behest of greed and corporate profit.

Due to our own lack of oversight and accountability, coupled with an abdication of introspection and self awareness, we sell ourselves - through their actions - to the highest bidder, while we argue amongst ourselves over who does a better job at it - the left or the right. We have always been our own worst enemy, while ignoring the real consequences of our actions in favor of the imagined outcomes, the spoon fed ideologies of our chosen political representation.

They don’t answer to us. They propagate the illusion that they do by reminding us to vote, tearing each other apart ideologically and publicly, fomenting fear and contempt for the other, depending on who butters your bread. But they pay us only lip service, while ignoring the needs, interests, and desires of humanity at large.

Instead, they answer to their financial backers; the movers and shakers of the American “dream”, while our cries and nightmares go unaddressed. They bow to those who pay for their extravagant campaigns, ad buys, and opposition pieces. Our representatives willingly take the thirty pieces of silver with a smile on their faces, and glee in their hearts. Judas felt guilty for his betrayal; while they go back with outstretched arms, and with sweaty little palms, each election season.

The idea that any of us have a true voice in the direction and destiny of our country is simply an elaborate illusion, designed by the ownership class to exert their influence upon the globe, regardless of who we are lead to believe is in charge. They have control because we have relinquished it and will not take back the reins.

This nation was founded on the revolutionary notion that people were the driving force of civilization, and as such, could be and would be better equipped to create a civil society.

We have lost our way.

The two truest enemies of the Founding Fathers were Aristocracies and Corporations, not the Redcoats and the Crown. These enemies were largely viewed as one and the same. Without so much as an whimper or a moan, we have surrendered to the enemy time and time again.

These two entities were antithetical to the ideas of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness of the individual, which were basic tenets of the Age of Enlightenment.

The corporation exists on the foundation of the exploitation of people in the name of profit. By controlling the means of our very survival - food, energy, transportation, and thought - they control the people. Servitude and dependence without the attachment of the linguistic term for what it is: slavery.

"Experience demands that man is the only animal which devours his own kind, for I can apply no milder term to the general prey of the rich on the poor." - Thomas Jefferson

Aristocracy is then afforded to those who willingly collude with the enemy - the new robber barons, scions, and nobility that we perpetuate ourselves. Be they Walton’s and Koch’s, or Buffet’s and Gates’, these are the new nobility, and we are their supplicating serfs, giving fealty to the lords of our chosen domains. Ain’t feudalism grand?

Freedom from tyranny meant freedom from aristocracies and corporations.

"I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country." - Thomas Jefferson

The Constitution was designed to act as a defense against such tyranny, enabling an informed populace to engage in self-government, and to act as a stalwart fighter against encroachment from either.

We are no longer informed.

We are no longer involved.

And having ignorantly placed ourselves in such a position, are we deserving of anything better?

"I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them but to inform their discretion." - Thomas Jefferson

Without taking drastic steps to curb our own complicity in our enslavement, we are a doomed nation in a rudderless world. Our corporate overlords - lords of the manor and all that they survey - are there by our own choosing. Bad choices are still choices, and inaction is an action in and of itself. The lords of the kingdom live by the fruits of our labors, and their prosperity does not reflect our own.

Economies are reliant upon people and the exchange of goods and services. Economics, and thereby the fabricated aristocracies and corporations, are intended to serve the people; not the other way around.

By our own apathy and selfishness, we have created this monster.

Maybe it's time for us to tear it down and start anew.