That all men are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety
-George Mason
I have stayed quiet on the topic of our government lately. I kept the faith that the American system of government would prevail and people would realize rights are at stake. As we go down the path of giving them up I fear we do so with gasoline and torches. We’ll burn the bridges and further march, most happily, toward the Police / Nanny state mentality.
Rights and freedoms are precious things and should be cherished yet we’re so accustomed to having them that fewer and fewer fight for them. We leave it to special interest groups who strike irksome and emotional altercations that further divide the nation.
We simply couldn’t fight for gay marriage as a union of concerned individuals that didn’t want our government dictating who and who we couldn’t marry – it had to get emotional and daft. It wasn’t us as a nation dictating what we wanted from our government it was us as a nation bickering, squabbling, mud slinging, and choosing sides against one another thus empowering our leadership to do the same thing.
You could say the same thing about abortion, we’re constantly fighting an argument among each other about the ethics and trying to legislate terms and conditions as if it were a piece of software or satellite television contract. As a nation we’ve not simply stood up with one voice and said “Leave the ethics to us but this is not your business to be legislated to death”.
I can be pro or anti gay marriage, pro or anti abortion, and pro or anti gun and still have the feeling that my duty as a citizen of this country is to tell the government to do what they need to do – ensure the safety and prosperity of this nation and stay the hell out of personal affairs.
It seems that the gun issue is the hot dividing flavor of the month. Pro gun leadership coming across like zealots fueled by ignorance (sure, let’s blame video games a few hundred more times and database the mentally ill… good plan… great plan). Anti gun in the media is trying to make me, as a rational and thinking human being, that there is merit that a pistol style grip will make a bullet more lethal. They’ll have you believe that because a gun looks like something you’ve seen in all the wars and conflicts since 1963 that it can reign the same kind of destruction.
You’ve got both sides lined up with their data spun to reflect just how right they are. There are meetings going on behind closed doors with anonymous leaks that I, a responsible American citizen, don’ t get to take part in. I can’t read the proposal, I can’t stand on the floor and state my stance, nor will I get a chance to have a voice to my leaders when this passes or fails.
Yet, to me, this is all part of a bigger issue in this country. We’d rather watch reality television than live in actual reality. We’re letting the few dictate the future of many, we’re letting the television raise our children, we’re watching the government giving out billions to banks and asking “where is mine?”.
At the same time we’ve been fighting  a tough economy for years and the American dream of owning property, owning a business, and building a better life for our children has been replaced with terrible loans that should have never been given leaving people homeless, WalMart’s, Applebee’s, and Home Depot’s dominating the suburban landscape leaving little to no room for American’s to make a life except for being a cog in the corporate machine.
Our schools aren’t preparing our children for life, the majority come out not understanding the importance of things like credit scores or how to read contracts. There is an overwhelming feeling from high school students of “what now?” but more alarming is the amount of college students leaving school and saying “what now?”.
We’re bickering over the size of magazines in firearms and worried about something called a Honey Boo Boo. We’re not taught the importance of global activity on local economy. We’re not taught what it means if Israel goes to war. We don’t know what it means, as a nation, when the Greek economy fell to pieces.
We just know there’s a bunch of gays that want to marry, women are sluts and want abortions, and keep your hands off my gun…
-or-
“I’m here, I’m queer, deal with it”, “the Government has no business in my vagina”, and “why do you need assault weapons?
…and then we all go to Walmart for groceries, some terrible chain restaurant for dinner, and talk about going to Ikea over the weekend.
When you compare the rest of the world to America we’re dumber, fatter, sadder, and consume more pills. We’re over stressed, under rested, and each class feels some invisible burden to take care of the classes below them.
How many times to you hear people complain about “giving my paycheck to those worthless drug addicts on welfare?” or similar..
We’re in a state of cultural warfare, class warfare, and religious warfare among each other and we drown our stress in fast food, long hours, pent up communications, undiagnosed mental illness (and the stigmas against it), watching The Biggest Loser and dreading work tomorrow.
We’ll all have opinions on the hot issues being ramrodded by the media and flooding our airwaves with trite comments that, if you really listen, talk to us like we’re stupid or state their opinion as fact. Â Yet no one will step back and look and who we have mediating these wars we fight each day…
A government full of lawyers and businessmen. Politicians that had money for the better ad campaign and said what you wanted to hear during election season.
What do they know about being truck drivers, teachers, helpdesk workers, single mothers, scientists, engineers, police officers, or any of the thousands of professions that makeup this country? If those folks can’t get elected so we all have a voice then tell me why the government made of students of law (that doesn’t seem to apply to them) that answer to lobbiests and special interest groups  should be in charge of telling me how many bullets I can keep in my gun? Why should they be telling anyone what they can or cannot do when it comes to civil/human rights?
Life
Liberty
Property
Happiness
Safety
…things that we’re guaranteed the pursuit of without being hindered. Yet we, as the people who are having our rights taken away, don’t care to stand up and say “ENOUGH!”. Maybe it’s because in all our years in the education system we never were taught how, maybe it’s because we have images of fire hoses and Kent State in our brain when we think about protesting those in charge, or maybe it’s because we have mouths to feed and getting out of bed tomorrow is going to be hard enough without taking on the government.
I fear as we lose our rights we also lose our voice because it’s gone horse and now falls on deaf ears from fighting one another so hard.
We are a diverse nation beset by corporate ideology, poor educational systems, massive debt, and no true and strong voice telling the government to simply govern the safety, infrastructure, and economy of this once great nation and stop being our nanny. I say this without sarcasm or exaggeration, it breaks my heart and I feel powerless to do anything about it.
