Personal essays
What to the Liberal is the Fourth of July
Ennui
There’s a scene in the movie “A few Good Men” –
“Oh Daniel,” your mind says, “I know that scene: ‘You can’t handle the truth.’”
No, not that scene.
It’s earlier and Joanne objects to something.
The judge overrules her and she follows, “I strenuously object.”
She is later taken to task for this by her colleagues as it doesn’t accomplish anything and it points out the weakness of her position. She’s already been overruled.
If she’d led with a strenuous objection that would have been a different matter. But once you’ve lost, there’s no point in rising to strenuously object.
On the other hand, rising to object over and over is better than sitting complacently complaining to each other online and in person.
It turns out, the founding fathers of the United States anticipated that. They knew we would quietly put up with this growing evil because it’s in our nature.
They wrote this down 250 years ago in the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence.
Documents like that are like Shakespeare. We are forced to read them too young before we have the experience to understand that the words have anything to do with us.
The preamble talks about exactly the times we are in right this minute. It says that people are “more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.”
The words
Once you get past the “when in the course” stuff, the preamble could be a series of texts written today.
When we first played with ChatGPT and other LLMs, people would give it a phrase or a prompt and ask it to be written in the style of Shakespeare or someone else.
Suppose we give a prompt like “American citizens are being snatched off the streets by masked agents of the government and sent to foreign prisons without due process.”
Add to that, “People of color and women are being treated worse than Christian white males.”
Oh, and, “the science that gave us groundbreaking medicine and the systems like Medicaid that saves lives are being decimated.”
Feel free to add in that “gay and trans people just want to live their lives.”
Write that in the style of Thomas Jefferson.
We would get something like the assertion “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.”
All of a sudden, these aren’t flowery words written on some parchment. They are words that live and resonate today.
The villain
How do we understand the soldiers and national guard that go into an American city and face American citizens with weapons?
How do we understand ordinary Americans who join ICE, don a mask, and do the unthinkable?
No villain thinks they are the villain in their own story.
“You can’t handle the truth.”
Colonel Jessup says that in his famous scene in “A Few Good Men”. Elsewhere in his speech he says something more telling. He gives us a glimpse inside the head of these people who put on a uniform and fight their own people. They don’t see us as their own people.
“I have neither the time nor the inclination,” Jessup says, “to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom that I provide and then questions the manner in which I provide it.”
Thankfully, some of us and our elected officials strenuously object. We need to do more.
It’s time
We shouldn’t change our government based on a whim.
Hey, chat thing, say that like Jefferson.
“Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes;”
It’s there, semicolon and all.
We look at the past six months and see how quickly things have turned dark. It’s been darker and quicker than any of us could have imagined.
There has been a consistent sequence of events that robs ordinary Americans of our freedom, safety, and money, while rewarding a very small group of the very rich.
What are we supposed to do?
It’s right there in the Declaration of Independence in surprisingly plain language.
“But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”
Our right. Our duty.
Essay from Dim Sum Thinking Newsletter 275. Read the rest of the Newsletter or subscribe