A More Perfect Union

June 15, 2017

Anger is a deliciously satisfying emotion, an easy high and best when shared. Americans share it well. For years we have engorged ourselves while our politicians and pundits have slopped us with it in troughs, as we slurp, our righteous indignation running down our chins and over our bellies, swollen with hatred and contempt. We have discovered our drug and lost ourselves, viewing our fellow citizens – the source of our strength and sustenance of our nation – as our enemies and those of the State and Party, to which we now bow prostrate, cravenly pledging obsequious fealty to the end. 

This is not America. Americans bow to no one. To no individual. Americans stand together, united, in singular service to an ideal – our Constitution – and in the defense of those rights and freedoms granted, and of those who cannot fight for themselves. In America, the end does not justify the means; rather, the means are the end itself, and shape that end, for if we uphold our laws, guided by our constitutional tenets, we form a more perfect union together – one that is consistent, predictable, stable, and trustworthy to the end. The path on which we set ourselves in recent years carries us instead to a place from which return is uncertain at best and historically catastrophic at worst. We must all stop, listen, and recall that time in America when we disagreed without hate, compromised without derision, and collaborated for the betterment of all. We did. Your parents did. You did. We can do it once more, if only we reclaim the strength of character and resolve to be the first among us to stand. 

Will you?