“Feudalists” first fear is full participation by all.
(EUGENE, Ore.) - From the first page of The Federalist Papers right on until the Constitution and Bill of Rights was finally achieved, the most potent prescience of all from our Founders was their emphasis on citizen participation.
They definitely intended pragmatic participation to be built on a foundation of fully-detailed information.
They knew what was required to guide wise decision and guarantee broad support for the new commonweal. That’s WHY their First Amendment was most cannily constructed to present, preserve and protect free, open and honest speech on any matter of common concern.
Wisely, openly and honestly they built that basic right of free speech clearly for humans like themselves.
What better pattern could they have found then? Participation follows naturally, given the major components of what later became known as “American exceptionalism”: Clear understanding of cooperative necessities, guiding potent combined people-power.
Knowing the full score, including complete action pattern and foreseeable consequences, has been the essential pattern for all American political action ever since those early days.
That was in large part the consequence painfully learned from preliminary experience with the Articles of Confederation. Early-America soon recognized that first-try effort as being “weak government and unfettered capitalismoriented” --demanding change in the full protection of any real democratic achievement reaching everyone.
Only when we have fallen into apathetic acceptance of lesser levels --sometimes distorted or even perverted for private gain-- have we found our democratic republic sometimes desperately damaged, and even in fatal danger.
The Civil War came about almost completely from the peculiar circumstances allowed to prevail in direct definance of what the Founders wrote in their famed Constitution and their admirable Bill of Rights.
The pattern of profound perversion allowing some humans to own others as chattels, with life-or-death power, and to possess and project private gain by so doing, was a festering sore within the American way of life for many years.
It took political, social, cultural --finally, most importantly, economic-- convulsion to relieve and remedy that woeful longterm/damaging, denial of our basic Constitutional provision for equal pursuit of happiness. The “lingering feudalist-folly for malign control of others” is only too well demonstated, by the ongoing remnants of racism.
That is still easily perceivable in situations such as “the Southern strategy”, repeated and still redolent, in some recent political campaigns. The most potent weapon vs this ongoing perversion became what we now know well as “the civil rights movement” --resulting in participative actions by many deeply concerned citizens of all races and political persuasions.
That led to the Civil Rights Act and its crucial very American-characteristic provisions, now an essential guide, via full information-applied, in every level of our national life.
Even, after our formative Presidential-choice election of Nov. 4th 2008, with more potent probabilities and promise than ever before achieved in this nation.
Participation via citizen involvement, pragmatic action and potent follow-on has provided us with many still-multiplying instances of its essential function for our democracy. That’s where the minimum wage law, voting rights for women, the Social Security system and Medicare- Medicaid, the GI Bill and the National Defense Education Act, and every other freeing and liberating person empowering progressive step has come from, too.
Meanwile “feudalists” --in a variety of groups, roles and aliases-- have continued to resist, all down the decades, anything resembling progress, especially if at any added-cost, and despite long-term proven economic advantage,
Their tried-and-tested ploys --sometimes successful for the short-run, more often overpowered by people performance applied-- have always followed the longtime propaganda-building pattern of “ Discuss, Delay, Defy -- then Do ANYthing to Defeat!”.
At times that has even mounted to the pseudomilitary level, and some of their projected materials, even today, actually includes assassination as a weapon ostensibly confined to usage in foreign policy.
That propangda-based approach was what the totalitarians and fascist-pattern prevaricators and perpetrators unleashed on the world in War I and II. They were unsucessful, too --for the same solid simple sensible reason: Potent people participation to protect, preserve, strengthen and further-project pragmatic forward progress for all.
For the war-decades that included troops in uniform and civil surround, too. For us, it now demands the same kind of mobilization for massive, continuing participation to control our continuing political destiny. Full information, from functional sources tested by close evaluation, building “informed opinion” to guide that participation, played its essential role, in those war-years, via the channels of our then still-free and operative print and broadcast press.
So it must be again. But now we are fully armed once and for all via the broad arrival of broadband, already demonstrated as effective means for political participation.
More people now participate via Internet-channel, in more ways and for more purposes, than for any other similar delivery-mode for decision-shaping information.
We can count on still further and even more affective and efficient action-mode, as our new President-Elect (as this is written) carries out his pledge for rebuilding our economy via active government action.
He stated today that rapid extension and expansion of broadband facilities is an essential part of that plan. That should give the remaining feudallist cliques and clients a new feeling of the fear they ultimately face most reluctantly: The inevitable, unavoidable, remorseless broadening and deepening of knowledgable citizen participation in all things bearing on our cooperative, democratic way of life.
Surely also inevitably and unavoidably that must now also broaden and strengthen --perhaps bring close to perfection-- the prescient Founder-vision for broad citizen participation.
These communication technologies, already proven indispensable in every area of American life, will now directly affect understandings controlling key decisions concerning our democracy, working from an everbroadening base.
The “digital delivery” now already arriving in most places is certainly now on the way even for our remote areas. Its easy-access to the whole world, and to everbroadening possibilities for learning and reference, will just as surely now arrive in every American home, to furnish ways-ad-means for personal empowerment never before possible.
What drives that trend, now becoming highlyvisible even to the politically-purblind, is not only social and cultural progress but sheer economic efficiencies, too -- already proven by wide demonstration at every level of nearly every human activity.
That should give those feudalists still surviving -- often sharply vocal on existing channels-- the final blow to their once-prevailing common political philosophy -- now lying so obviously in shred-and-remnant around them.
There is simply no way to defy, deny and defeat what has become obvious forward progress, not only in our own nation, but broadly (as in “broadband:!) across the entire world.
We may perhaps rue-the-day when distortion and perversion for private-gain purposes came to curse the American way in politics, but there is something both intriguing and highly satisfying in seeing it sliced like salami via honest, open, democratic-channel citizen participation.
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Henry Clay Ruark is the one of, if not the most experienced, working reporter in the state of Oregon, and possibly the entire Northwest. Hank has been at it since the 1930's, working as a newspaper staff writer, reporter and photographer for organizations on the east coast like the Bangor Maine Daily News.Today he writes Op-Ed's for Salem-News.com with words that deliver his message with much consideration for the youngest, underprivileged and otherwise unrepresented people.
Op Ed: Strong DemocracySalem-News.com