There are No Unalienable Rights but Only Those We Fight For.

JoeCarl

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Friday February 02, 2018 · 8:55 AM PST

2018/02/02 · 08:55

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“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

The man who wrote those words owned human beings.

George III, King of Great Britain and of Ireland, Jefferson’s king, must have laughed at those words. When he stopped laughing and said, “Prove it,” we fought. But revolutions, by their nature, prove the opposite of Jefferson’s dream. There is no absolute morality – no self-evident truths, no unalienable rights. All we have is what we have fought for, and nothing won ever is kept but by vigilance and a wiliness to keep fighting.

The Republican Party increasingly is anti-American, anti-democratic. It is a decades long trend. Trump feeds that impulse and feeds upon it. Now, we are at the point where we may have to fight, again. If Rosenstein or Mueller is fired and Republicans shrug, we must fight. If Mueller documents treachery and Republicans shrug, we must fight. If Putin is allowed to continue his attacks on us because they benefit Republicans, we must fight.

But those words are easy to write. What do they mean? Jefferson’s words were idealistic but, our Founders backed them. What backs our talk of resistance? How do we fight? Do protests matter in Trump’s America? How do we sustain any protest? How do use them to target the midterm election? Where will the leadership come from? I have no answers, but I know that we must start talking about the questions. The time is near that we may have to fight.

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