Of Human Bondage

My view is that forces of great wealth have today's humanity in bondage no less than blacks were shackled before the Union victory asserted the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for everyone. Our government was established to \"secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity\", not to corporate legal persons which now control our food, water, energy, media and government. The Union they fought for then and the unions now under attack both attempt to serve the people-- people with hearts and responsibilities-- not irresponsible, heartless and immortal legal fictions possessing great wealth. Inanimate objects cannot \"Love One Another\".The mere pursuit of profit cannot sustain the high ideals that guide us or the bulletproof ideas that spread throughout humanity like quantum entanglement.

Today's conflict must be fought with ballots, not bullets, and by law, not force. Nonetheless, people are dying, children go without food and education, women in childbirth are threatened with poor nutrition so that Exxon can continue to collect taxpayer subsidies, and General Electric can dominate US media as it sends our jobs overseas. BP continues to dump toxic sludge into Lake Michigan in order to raise stock prices a couple cents by economizing on safe disposal. Prosecutors, in the name of the people, withhold exonerating evidence and send the innocent to private, for-profit prisons, merely to reap political benefit and higher office. Worst of all, war and mass murder have become a profit-making business.

But I, personally, do not fear for the outcome of this battle. Human nature is such that liberty is the only thing that has ever worked and will ever work, long term. Sadly, no doubt many will suffer and die needlessly along the way, but inalienable rights is infinitely viable and human bondage is fatally vulnerable. Eventually even the Supreme Court will face the existential necessity of the Bill of Rights. The prodigious creativity and productivity of a free society will always outperform entrenched interests and old technologies just as the auto brought the end of horse manure in the streets.

May we never see here the chaos, barbarity, suffering, carnage and disintegration of violent conflict. Those who fought and died to secure the blessings of liberty, equality and peace will live in our hearts forever.