Feeling our pain

No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. 
But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.
(Section Three, Amendment Fourteen, Constitution of the United States of America)




I know how you feel. You feel like there is nothing you can do. You feel hopeless, even though you have always been optimistic about the future. You fall for the hype, often because the hype represents the way things would be if you were in charge. If we were in charge. If We the People were in charge, as we are meant to be.

Maybe your hopes soared with the words of a man who promised hope and change. You needed hope and change, and, God! you wanted to believe him.

I know how you felt when the Patriot Act didn't go away, when the secret torture sites didn't go away, and when the National Defense Authorization Agreement of 2012 was signed into law. I know it felt as if the last fragile fragment of hope had finally died.

I know how you felt when the Occupy Movement began. I know that you were probably a bit skeptical at first, but then realized that this could be it. This could be the movement we needed, to put the People back in charge of our nation. I know how you felt when Occupiers were gassed and shot and arrested. I know how you felt when their possessions, their homes, their clothing and their books and papers were destroyed, and when those brave people who stood up for those of us who would not or could not stand up ourselves were inexorably driven out of their tent cities by forces they could never have imagined would rise up against them.

I know that your heart swells with pride when you see that the Occupy Movement has not been defeated - that there are still Occupiers out there, standing for what they, and we, believe in.

I know you realize that those who chose, finally, to fight back with violence were not the true Occupiers, but infiltrators. Occupy spokespersons have said they knew there would be infiltrators. Of course there are infiltrators. There have always been infiltrators. That is how governments control their people. Politicians needed to be able to point to some form of lawlessness. Even We the People, politicians realized, would not continue to believe that those who simply occupied deserved the treatment they received from those who claim to protect and serve. And politicians, who have a great deal to lose when We the People finally wake up, couldn't take that chance.

The Occupy Movement has a large presence online, now, and all of us can remember when our nation thrilled to the fact that, despite the attempt of some foreign governments to shut down internet access to protesters, the people of this country worked to maintain that access, restore it, keep it alive.

I know how you feel when you hear about the transparent laws politicians are now pursuing to allow them to destroy internet access in this "land of the free" whenever they want to do so. I know you have protested those laws, and I know that you hang your head, without hope, because you realize that  politicians have already usurped the power to do this, and are only seeking to formalize this new insult to freedom to somehow mitigate our outrage.

Well, our outrage has been mitigated for too long. We have allowed our government to reach this point. We have watched while the civil rights, the Constitutional rights, of one group of society after another have been trashed and destroyed. In far too many cases we have cheered these politicians on, joining with them, and letting them convince us that those people, for example, whose homes and property are seized and destroyed for the mere suspicion of drug use, are worthless trash. When, in fact, they are our brothers. They are our sisters. They are We the People.

No one wants anyone to sell drugs to children. But so many citizens who have been subjected to "asset forfeiture," fines, and prison, have never done anything worse than smoke marijuana. They made the mistake of believing they were free and sovereign citizens. They broke, or are suspected of having broken, a politician-created law that gives politicians control over our very bodies, along with everything else we own. Why have we allowed politicians to assume control over the very bodies of the citizens of this country? It was a dangerous, foolish step to take. But we took it. And since politicians got away with doing this for one of the least offensive "offenses" known to man, they have decided they can do it for almost any reason they choose.

See what we did? We opened our gates to the Trojan Horse.

Every one of our brothers and sisters that we lose to a prison, or whose breaking of a politician-created law removes their voting rights, leaves us a smaller, weaker force to be reckoned with. Every time we cheer for this kind of tyranny, we become complicit in tyranny, regardless of how we feel about drug use.

Now politicians claim they have the right to determine that someone is a terrorist without a trial. We should have seen that coming. They tested the waters with property seizure before a trial. It was only a matter of time.

I know that you feel hopeless. Sometimes I feel hopeless as well. But there is a solution to our problem - the problem of politicians who care absolutely nothing for the majority of people in this country, or the country itself, but only for power, for wealth, and for those who can pay politicians the most money. A solution exists, and I will continue to struggle to bring that solution to the attention of the people of this nation.

But if the solution is to work, we all have to stand together to make it work.

Most of the people I talk to about invoking Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment say that the politicians won't allow us to get away with it - that we don't have the power.

But we must claim that power.

I have watched this nation that I love so dearly turn into a nation I do not recognize. Where presidential candidates admit their lack of interest in the poor; where politicians champion putting poor children to work cleaning toilets; where politicians stand up for greedy pharmaceutical companies, and shout down and ridicule people who plead for government intervention to keep children alive; where politicians make unconscionable amounts of money from insider trading, and lock citizens in prison for far less blatant infractions; where politicians suggest cutting services senior citizens have been paying for all their lives, believing that politicians would keep their word.

We should have looked to our history books, or asked a Native American how politicians keep their word.

An overwhelming percentage of our politicians, elected, appointed, Executive, Legislative, Judicial, state and federal are failing us miserably, literally harming us and this country. And they are actually doing it on purpose. They know exactly what they are doing, and they know that what they are doing is not for the common welfare. They know they have caused each and every problem we face, and they also know they are going to make us pay for it as if it had been our fault. We cannot vote them out, because too many of them will remain who will continue to run the system the way they are running it now.

But we have the Constitution.

Has anyone noticed how the politicians pay lip service to the Constitution? If we were to believe them, we might almost think that they take seriously their oath to defend this document. But lip service is only that. The document they swore to protect is actually something they are deliberately and systematically destroying. How many times have you heard a politician brag about making an end run around the Constitution? How many times have you heard a politician say that the Constitution was "too complicated" for anyone who wasn't a lawyer (or a politician) to understand, and that we poor citizens need to have it interpreted for us?

How many times did a teacher in your federally-funded public school career spend even so much as a full semester on the content and meaning of this most important document in our nation? Ever wonder why that might be? Ever think it might be because the Constitution is the document that gives far more power to the people than it does to the politicians? Of course they don't want us to know that.

I have written about this before, but I believe it is my sacred duty in life to continue doing so. So please bear with me, and please believe that we do have the power to change things. Please believe that this is not something that politicians can (legally) keep us from doing.

We can invoke Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment, and we can actually rid ourselves, peacefully, legally, Constitutionally, of any politician who has ever proposed a bill, voted for a bill, signed a bill, acted under the auspices of a law or declared Constitutional a law which is not Constitutional. We have to stand our ground, though, because politicians will definitely fight us on this. They will say that the words printed at the top of this essay do not mean what they say. They will say that Congress itself has to enforce Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment - which would be true if almost every member of Congress had not already literally resigned his or her position. They will say that Congress has the right to make exceptions to Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment. Again, this would be true if there were enough Congressmen who still legally held their positions. My guess is that there are not. My guess, as well, is that any Congressmen who can be found never to have weakened the Constitution are Congressmen who will not excuse anyone who has done so.

It won't be difficult to prove whether any politician has attacked or weakened the Constitution. There are watchdog groups that keep track of every politician's record. All we have to do is find any unconstitutional laws, and since the number of such laws grows larger every day, we won't have any trouble finding enough.

Then we count the politicians who introduced or voted for even one of those unconstitutional laws.

Then we count the politicians, executives at the state and federal level, who signed any unconstitutional laws, and the officials in the administrations of those politicians who did not speak out or resign their posts in protest over those laws, or who acted under the auspices of those laws.

Then we count the judges who argued, against all reason, that those laws were Constitutional. There are some judgments that transcend common sense. We are intelligent people, and I think we will know those when we see them. My personal nominee for most egregious is Bennis vs. Michigan, in which the Supreme Court ruled that since innocent owners of property have historically been punished in this country, such punishment has the power of precedent, despite the Constitution. Please look this up for yourself, because I am sure you won't believe it otherwise.

Like it or not, all of those who have been involved in creating or furthering an unconstitutional law in any way have resigned their positions in government. They have to go. If they choose not to go, then we must stand our ground and insist that they go. We have no choice. They have no choice. The Constitution of the United States says they simply cannot hold office. And their termination, whether they realize it or not, is retroactive to the first moment after they took that oath to defend the Constitution, and then failed to do so.

This is not an attempt to overthrow the government, although I have accepted the fact that this will likely be the line politicians take against it and against me. Politicians are not our government. The positions they fill, and the Constitution that binds them are the government. And We the People are the government.

I know how you feel. I feel the same way. I am not without fear. I don't know what today's politicians will do with someone who attempts to make them obey the Constitution. I do know, though, that I cannot live with myself if I don't, at the very least, make the effort.

Can you?