The “Long Train” – An Anatomy of Our Thinking, Part 2, by Ray Zwarich

In Part 1 I proposed that a question be ‘brought to the Floor’.

To wit:

If we would grasp the power to forestall the terrible fate of the impending Apocalypse, hanging over all Humanity like Damocles’ famous sword, (and on the thinnest of threads, rather than on a single hair from a horse’s tail, as in the fable, but with that thread’s fibers visibly fraying), how can we do it?

If we would forestall the evil Tyrants that rule over us from their monstrously murderous and bloody behavior, which we are forced to watch each and every day, how can we do it?

If we are resolved that we must prevent these Tyrants from crushing our children’s future under the Iron Heel of their evil greed for wealth and unholy lust for power, how can we do it?

What is our thinking? What is our plan?

Every day I read dozens of articles, quite literally dozens, from marvelously brilliant writers, brilliantly describing the tyranny we now live under, and eloquently complaining about how bad it is for us to live under this rapidly increasing tyranny. But I never seem to encounter articles from anyone that propose a PLAN for how we can throw off the yoke of this tyranny, to become free citizens again.

What is our plan? THAT is THE question that most needs to be ‘brought to the Floor’.

We can ALL see that our political system, which once aspired to be ‘democratic’, that our government “off the people, by the people, and for the people”, a government that was designed and intended to represent the ‘will of the people’, has been so completely corrupted, has been so completely transformed into a giant system of fully legalized bribery, a system designed for wealth itself to control, a system which has empowered the small class of the Super-Wealthy to control it, and thus to rule over us as Tyrants, is now, by itself, due to the stinking sewer swamp extent of its rotten corruption, not able to provide us, by its own mechanisms alone, the means to reclaim our nation under the control of ALL the nation’s citizens.

Our political system has been so ‘rigged’ by the Super-Wealthy who control it, that it no longer provides us the means to challenge their power. These Tyrants have used their control of our political system to ‘rig’ our entire economy. Our entire economy has been so ‘rigged’ into a giant mafia-style ‘racket’, so brilliantly designed to ‘fleece’ the Common People, that we have no hope of ever again living in dignity, as free citizens, free from anxiety for our families’ safety and security, unless we exploit ‘extra-political’ means to throw off these Tyrants’ power over us.

Our government is no longer the least bit ‘democratic’. We ALL know this… We ALL know that any who think it is are simply poor ignorant fools…

The US Government no longer represents, in even the smallest iota, the interests and “general Welfare”, (as mandated in the ‘Preamble’ of our Constitution), of our nation’s Common People. ALL the nation’s people can see that our nation’s government no longer represents us, that it no longer cares about the Welfare of our families and friends and communities. Our government now ONLY serves the interests of the Super-Wealthy Elites that use the raw power of their purloined wealth to completely control it.

Yet we continue to be ever more heavily taxed, with the government using our tax money to benefit only the few Super-Wealthy Elites who control it. We are like slaves, most of us, the vast majority of us, toiling for wages that cannot provide us the means to live ‘free’, free from constant crushing anxiety for our families’ safety and Welfare.

Yet in spite of the fact that our meager wages already are so low that they cannot afford us to live in human dignity, as free citizens, the Super-Wealthy Tyrants use the powers of our government, powers under their despotic control, to continue to steal a portion of our meager wages, to steal money from our pockets, to take food off our children’s tables, so that they can shovel money, by the truckload, into the already bursting vaults behind the high-steel walls that surround their gilded palaces, where they live in unimaginable luxury, luxury which they have stolen from OUR paychecks.

As we ALL surely remember, “NO taxation without representation!” was once the rousing ‘battle cry’ that inspired the overthrow of a despotic government’s tyrannical power.

Yet “taxation without representation” is exactly the DEADLY predicament in which our nation’s Common People now find ourselves.

It should be self-evident, one would think, (if thinking rationally), that we can’t depend on a political system that is under the complete control of our tyrannical Adversary, to take away that Adversary’s power. We can still make good use of our political system in certain ways, to be sure, (as explained later), but other means must be employed as are legally provided to us, as citizens, under our nation’s founding documents, as generally declared in our ‘Declaration of Independence’, and as specifically defined in our Constitution.

We must use these legally stipulated means and powers, these ‘extra-political’ powers, these powers over, above, and beyond our use of the corrupted political system itself, in order for us to throw off the tyrannical power of the Super-Wealthy Ruling Elites, to reclaim our nation as a functioning democracy, governed in the interests of ALL ‘the People’, governed by the ONE overriding precept that a democratic government’s highest priority must be to “promote the general Welfare”, ‘general’ meaning the ‘Welfare’ (capitalized in the original text) of ALL the people, and to “secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity”.

So… That’s what we need to do… If any disagree, please speak up…

But what’s our plan? Brave words are easy. We need a plan of ACTION… Now is not the time for any free citizen among us to be shy. If any have a conceptual plan in your minds, let’s hear it! If any have ideas that can contribute to formulating a plan, let’s hear them!

Surely whatever plan we adopt must be multi-faceted, and it’s likely that some facets will be better perceived and elucidated by some citizens, while other facets will will be better perceived and understood, to be brought before us by others. [The one ‘mission-critical’ factor, of course, a factor that we must discuss at length, is that we, the People, the Common People, must set aside our differences in order to adopt an overarching common objective.]

I have a Plan… I have a specific and highly detailed Plan… It goes by the general name “revolution”… It does NOT entail violence, however, nor any other illegal means. In fact, violence, any violence at ALL, would be its COMPLETE undoing.

The revolution we must execute to win our freedom from the tyranny we have fallen under, must be built upon a Spiritual Foundation that, above all, eschews hatred, or any other form of emotionalized hysteria, including any form of violence. Ends do not justify means. Means become the ends. Revolutions that seize power through violence then rule through violence. To build a True Democracy, democracy itself must be the means we use to build it. The Spiritual Foundation of the Revolution we need to build will become the Spiritual Foundation of the society we build from it.

Revolution, the act of using our inalienable rights and powers to throw off a despotic government’s unjust rule, is completely ‘legal’ in our nation, according to our founding ancestors, and according to the founding documents they authored. According to Jefferson’s ‘Declaration’, and Madison’s ‘Constitution’, we, the People, the nation’s Common People, have not merely the right, not merely the just and legal power, but the DUTY, (the actual word Jefferson used), to act together to throw off the yoke of tyranny that has been cinched tight ’round our necks.

Together these documents provide for the rights of citizens to seize our own ‘extra-political’ legal powers, as specified in the documents, if our government should ever become tyrannical, which we can ALL see that it clearly has.

If this is not obvious to all, please allow me to explain.
***

Along about 1957 or ’58, in Mrs. Shanklin’s fourth grade class, in a public school in Prairie Village, Kansas, we were required to memorize words that elucidated the thinking of people who were instrumental in creating, and then preserving, our nation. We were given a choice between memorizing Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, (as quoted above), or else the first two paragraphs of Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence. (Fool that I am, I did both).

We all have surely often heard these words repeated, and most of us have surely spoken them ourselves, at least in our minds, and likely out loud at one time or another, in the course of our often thwarted attempts to live up to them. As we have spoken these words, have we not felt the gooseflesh of inspiration crawl up the backs of our necks? These are the words, after all, that capture the most basic ethos, the most basic Spirit, the most basic ideals, the most basic beliefs, on which our once hopeful and idealistic nation, on which the very idea of ‘America’, was founded.

In our current times of great strife, when it seems that the thinking on which our nation was based and created has been obscured in the minds of so many of us, at a time when our nation’s founding ethos has been trod into the mire of human passions, into the bloody mire of greed for wealth and lust for power, it could serve us well to revisit and contemplate the words that best capture the ‘anatomy’ of our Founding Ancestors’ thinking. After doing so, perhaps we each then might benefit from examining in detail, from ‘dissecting’, (if you will), the anatomy of our OWN thinking, as we watch the fatal dark storm of certain annihilation, the annihilation of all Humanity, gather its power in the distance.

After all these 66-67 years since 1957-58, (67 years is 27% of the entire history of our nation, since 1776), my memory is surely not perfect, and in small but crucial ways I have intentionally updated more archaic terms to their fuller more developed meaning. But as I recall…

After stating briefly that “a decent respect for the opinions of [Humankind]” required that an explanation be given for why people in America felt compelled to “assume among the powers of the Earth” the most basic rights granted by the highest authority, the rights to which all people are entitled by “the Laws of Nature” and by “Nature’s God”, to exercise these most basic rights by throwing off being abusively governed by the British king, in order to establish a new governing authority.

Jefferson began by stating:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all [people] are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these rights are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights governments are instituted among [the people], deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them will seem most likely to affect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be overthrown for light and transient causes. And all our human experience has shown that people are more disposed to suffer, as long as evils are sufferable, than to overthrow the powers of a government to which they have become accustomed. But when a long train of abuses by the government assault the people, a ‘long train of abuses’ clearly designed to one purpose, to reduce the people to absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their DUTY, to throw off such a government, and to provide new safeguards for their future security.”

Jefferson then goes on to list the specifics of the “long train of abuses” by the British king, and concludes by declaring that the people of America were, by declaring their independence, throwing off the despotic tyranny of their existing government. By this Declaration, as quoted above, our ancestors were exercising their “inalienable RIGHT” to “abolish” that government’s authority over them, in order to undertake the creation of a new governing authority to better safeguard their lives, their liberty, and their pursuit of happiness.

What is quoted above is from an old man’s memory, (my 76 years, since 1948, comprise 31% of our nation’s entire history, since 1776), with minor revisions for more developed clarity, but if you’ll check an actual text, I think you’ll find that although I’ve taken a few minor ‘liberties’ by modernizing more archaic language, liberties which I don’t think that Jefferson would object to, it is substantially accurate.

Could we not, in America today, make more or less the exact same declaration of our intent? As the ‘long train of abuses’ inflicted on our nation’s people by our governing powers becomes longer each day, how easy would it be for us to make a list of the specifics of this “Long Train” of often DEADLY indignities that the small class of Super-Wealthy Elites, that have captured our nation under their despotic power, have wrought upon us?

They’ve abrogated our freedom of speech itself. They’ve taken away our most cherished and most essentially BASIC democratic right.

They’ve brought ‘the press’, the Fourth Estate, the Mass Media, the nation’s means of communication, under their centralized control, and are using their control to foment a constantly gushing Fount of Lies, lies that nobody believes but which they use to rationalize their constant unjust actions.

They have thus, by the above actions, effectively, by edict, by their own ‘dictate’, repealed the First Amendment, with no trace, with not one whit, of legal ‘due process’.

We are being heavily taxed without our consent, without our voices, as the People, being represented in how our tax money is being spent.

They are violating the Constitutionally assigned ‘checks and balances’ on power by spending our taxes without Constitutional authorization. They have thus baldly usurped the power to spend our purloined taxes to wage war without our consent.

They are violating the Constitutionally assigned ‘checks and balances’ on power by waging unjust imperial wars without the consent of Congress, thus without Constitutional authorization. They are waging wars that enrich themselves, as the gluttonous, gorged stockholders in the unholy American War Industry, wars whose only purpose is to maintain their imperial power to exploit wealth from the Common People in other nations.

They have allowed a tiny foreign nation to accumulate so much power over us that the leader of that nation has more power and influence over our own government than we, the People of our own nation, the People of America, or even our own elected office-holders, even our own POTUS, do.

They are using the police powers of the government to prosecute their political opponents on transparently fabricated charges. They are selectively enforcing the nation’s laws, prosecuting their political opponents for doing things that they themselves commonly do with impunity.

They are deliberately refusing to enforce our nation’s immigration laws, and without our consent, without the citizens of our nation even being consulted, they are deliberately allowing tens of millions of foreigners to flood into our nation without anyone even knowing who any of those people are, or what their intent might be. They are thus deliberately refusing to execute their Constitutional duty to protect us from foreign threats to our safety and security.

They are claiming to have absolute authority over our own children, over and above the will and authority of parents. They are thus claiming that ‘the state’, the government, has powers that are not set out in the Constitution. They are using that authority to inculcate bizarre extremist beliefs into our children, starting in pre-school, and they are already taking children away from parents who resist allowing their children to be inculcated with these bizarre extremist beliefs.

They have violated the protections afforded to our citizens, by the Constitution, against unjust government intrusion into our private affairs. We no longer have any effective rights to even a minimal degree of privacy, or to being protected from illegitimate searches and seizures. Heavily armed government forces, armored like soldiers against armed foreign enemies, are breaking down the doors of families, holding terrorized children under the point of assault rifles, to seize private materials they have no just right to examine. They are using their police powers to assault people in public places, putting them ‘in irons’, not merely handcuffs but also leg-irons, as if those people were known to be dangerously violent criminals, on administrative legal charges that do not remotely justify such violent threatening treatment.

National Police and Intelligent officials commit bald-faced perjury with complete impunity, claiming the right to lie under oath to the representatives of the People, claiming the right to lie with impunity, after swearing an oath, to Congress, while they also claim it to be a felony crime, punishable by imprisonment, for any citizen to lie to them. Officials, and former officials, of our despotic government are now walking free, never having been held to account, after telling PROVEN lies, under oath, to Congress, lies which they fully well knew to be lies, while many citizens are now imprisoned for telling even the most minor lies to our National Police, (despite our Constitutional rights to privacy and against self-incrimination).

As they use their power of control of our government, through undisguised bribery, to pass laws that allow them to steal the nation’s wealth from the Common People, leaving us in crushing anxiety for our families’ Welfare, even leaving teeming millions of our children to live in constant gnawing hunger, to enrich themselves into an obscenely indecent degree of gilded luxury, the Super-Wealthy Tyrants who rule over us want us to fear them, to fear their power.

In a True Democracy the People do not fear the power of their government. In a True Democracy, the government fears the power of the People.

Our government has fallen so completely under the power of an Elite Few, so completely that we ALL can see that it no longer even resembles a democracy, that if we created a full list of the actions of our government that comprise the “Long Train of Abuses” against us, how long would that list be?

This “Long Train” has already been pulled so far down the track that it clearly has become abject tyranny. The tyranny that now rules over us is at least as bad as that to which King George III subjected our ancestors.

Our venerated Constitution is so regularly violated that is has been effectively repealed. It is now used only when convenient to the Ruling Tyrants’ purposes and desires. Our Constitution is being used as a DEADLY weapon against us, when it serves our Ruling Tyrants’ purposes and desires. All the protections of our liberties, all our safeguards against tyranny, which the Constitution once afforded us, have been effectively eradicated. Our Ruling Tyrants are throwing citizens into literal dungeons, even suspending our most basic legal protections, even suspending habeas corpus, imprisoning citizens for long periods without even bringing charges, for exercising their rights that the Constitution was intended to protect.

“Whenever any government becomes destructive of those ends, it is the right of the people to alter, or to abolish it”. It’s right there, stated clear as day, at the very outset of our nation’s one most seminal Founding Document, which then goes on to declare that it is not merely our right, but our DUTY to “throw off such government, and to provide new safeguards for our future security”.

There it is, folks… Clearly stated in black hand-quilled text on wrinkled venerated parchment…

At the moment of our nation’s inception, it was clearly stated that THE most basic ethos on which this nation is founded is that the “inalienable rights” of the People, the human rights derived from “Nature’s God”, supersede the rights of ANY government.

In this nation our ancestors founded, it was intended, from the very declaration of our new nation’s existence, that the ‘inalienable’ power of the People supersedes the power of a tyrannical government. Thus it was intended that our nation’s people should never fear our government, but rather that our government should always fear our people, because the rights and powers of the people are granted by an authority MUCH higher than that of any mere government.

I’m going to cut this off here. Following, in Part 3, I will take up a discussion of the social, political, and cultural impediments that thus far have both prevented us from preventing our government from falling under the power of the Super-Wealthy US Ruling Tyrants, and now prevent us from taking the actions that History itself is demanding from us, which our Founding Ancestors declared as our DUTY as citizens.

Hope all are well and in strong Spirit.

Simius Cognitius