We mutually pledge to EACH OTHER our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.
John Donne's Meditation XVII:
All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated...As therefore the bell that rings to a sermon, calls not upon the preacher only, but upon the congregation to come: so this bell calls us all: but how much more me, who am brought so near the door by this sickness....No man is an island, entire of itself...any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
The basis of democracy is the fundamental belief in an egalitarian society where one is only limited by his or her own ability. It is a collective mission of individual self-actualization. Whenever forces move to obstruct that potential, democracy suffers.
The greatest disservice to this nation and to democracy worldwide is the co-opting of "rugged individualism." The concept exploded in the 1980s with the Reaganite movement and coincided with the "Me Decade." From this point on the focus in government was on the individual, not society as a whole. Ideas were framed in a different way. We stopped looking at what we could accomplish together and started wondering what was being taken away from us.
What do we have to show for it now? Never before has our society been more fractured, paranoid, or manipulated. We are pitted against each other over intractable issues while the purveyors of this endless series of conflict hollow out this country into a shell of what it was and still could be. Our lives are defined by a continuously declining set of inputs. Television is now the sole occupier of our collective time and the singular source for our version of reality.
A decline in social interaction has accompanied the new focus on the individual. People used to come together in their communities for all sorts of occasions. Now most social interaction is done at work around the water cooler or through secondary modes of communication such as the telephone or the internet. Sports, television, celebrity, and memorializing the empty events of our own personal lives account for 99% of interpersonal communication. We have become the most "educated" uneducated society in the history of civilization.
It's time to wake up. What has become of this country? For all of the idealized nostalgia heaped upon the 1950s, this much is true: we were a nation of dreamers then, and anything was possible. What should have been the most hopeless, fear-laden times in this country's history were its greatest. We went to the moon. We ushered in a new era of convenience, of technology, of hope in which our advances made possible for the first time the long-held belief that no person should want of food or shelter or medical care.
We were derailed.
Now we're lost, we've been lost for a generation, and we're going to stay lost until each individual out there reaches out. In order to find meaning and purpose in our own lives we need to find each other. We need to rally together to feel human again. What is separating the human race right now from any other animal on earth? Is it our ability to reason? To create, dream, love, build, advance? The potential is there, but in practice we destroy, ignore, hate, and do everything but exercise our God-given gifts as human beings. What makes us more than beasts? What makes you human?
I reject the culture of consumption. I reject individualism. I refuse to take part in a mad dash for resources. I will not be defined by economic expenditures. This new world that was born the same time as I is not the world I want to leave to children.
We're in this together. The hopes and dreams of generations past, present, and future are all dependent on what we do in the here and now. We owe it to the memory of those that came before and the potential of those that will follow after we are gone to take care of this world and everything in it, to join together to further humanity.
There's no agenda here. It's just time to start thinking big again.