War, Environmental Destruction, Recession: It's Time for a Revolution

You know you are in a perilous period in American history when the optimist and pessimist no longer vie with each other but eerily agree that the glass is neither half full nor half empty but is ... shattered.

The question is: Should the country revert to business as usual and pick up whatever fragments it can manage? Or, must Americans out of necessity walk carefully through the shattered pieces in order to make a fresh start with a totally new glass?

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The year 1776 was one of those rare revolutionary moments. It was a time in which the populace told themselves, as did their leaders and writers, that if a people were committed to practical hope and collective futures and believed that the idea of America was greater than the struggles over class, race and gender, which were sure to come, then the American people and its government would give definition and meaning to practical hope and the pursuit of happiness. It would become an idea that would be found individually and collectively through the common good that would reflect an economic bill of rights for all the people (all the more important in this touch-and-go economy) and constitutional legal rights such as habeas corpus for all who live under the flag of the United States.

Bloody as our history has been when we fight preventive and preemptive wars abroad and against ourselves in civil war and the ferocious destruction of the Native Americans, the United States can still be the place where falsity and oppression do not have to define our way of life and our government to ourselves or others. The pursuit of just laws and actions can be our 21st century covenant if only we will admit that:

Every day people from other nations wonder why we destroy the hopes that others continue to place in American society when we support corrupt, oppressive dictators for reasons of realpolitik. (Will President-elect Barack Obama continue this dubious -- and immoral -- policy?)

They wonder why the U.S. Constitution is treated like so much butcher paper to cover over the putrefying smell of an aggressive war foisted on the American people by a president (aided and abetted by many Democrats in Congress) addicted to lies around weapons of mass destruction and increased surveillance of American citizens. (Let's remember that as senator, Obama, a former constitutional law professor, voted with the majority to give the ultra-secretive National Security Agency even greater license to spy on Americans without a court warrant. As president, how will he now treat and interpret the Constitution?)

They wonder how it is that the United States, when it fights wars, tells itself that it is not a warrior nation when its political problem is to recognize and overcome that very fact? (Obama certainly has the knowledge and intellect to do this.)

They wonder how President George W. Bush and his Svengalian vice president could escape impeachment and accountability before the Congress for subverting settled constitutional law and flouting international law for which there was no basis for the American attacks. Indeed, the Nuremberg judgment and American domestic law, had they been applied strictly, would have seen a number of the Bush armchair warriors in the dock. Yet it appeared that the laws were not self-executing; political will was necessary, and after the President Clinton impeachment fiasco, such will was not present in Congress.

Thus, it was easier for a compliant media to accept Bush's argument that the United States was under attack from Iraq and Afghanistan and therefore had the U.N. Security Council's blessing to make war when the council's resolution plainly did not give the United States that authority on its own say so. Thus, these and other lies became truth in ways that would have astounded even George Orwell.