Sounds like a no brainer – be born or get naturalized as an American, end of story. No – being an American begins the story. There’s so much more than just being a placeholder to being an American.
We the People, of the United States of America, in order to form a more Perfect Union, establish justice and ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare and ensure the blessings of liberty, to ourselves and our Posterity, do Ordain and Establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
Preamble to the United States Constitution
That Constitution serves a purpose – it establishes the rules by which we govern ourselves and by which our government is governed. It enshrines our rights and sets up a complex system of checks and balances that ensure liberty by keeping power in check.
The beauty of the Constitution is that it checks power by balancing power against itself. Federal and State. Executive, Legislative and Judicial. Governed and Governor. But all that power comes from the people themselves – they have the final say on how their power will be exercised in their name. The primary mechanism for that control is the ballot box – elections. But it is not the only one.
For a variety of reasons, some well intentioned, some not so much, we have allowed the sails of government to go slack – We the People haven’t controlled the Ship of State. We’ve allowed the Federal government to take on roles never intentioned and without Us providing the oversight. Government grows but it solves fewer and fewer problems.
That’s our fault. But the story doesn’t end there – it never has. This business of the masses governing the nation is messy and we’ve messed up more than once in our history. The Founding Fathers referred to our system as the American Experiment – and it has occasionally blown up in our faces.
It took 10,000 tries to perfect the lightbulb. Lightbulbs aren’t as simple as we think they are which is why it took a lot of work to figure them out. Self governance is a lot more complicated – it’s not going to always be easy. But like Edison tinkering with the lightbulb, we already know this thing will work – we just need to keep at it until it works so well that everyone wonders why we had to work so hard to get something so ‘simple’.
The lightbulb was a worthwhile goal – worth all 10,000 tries. ‘The Government of the People, by the People and for the People’ – as Lincoln rightly inferred – is so worthwhile that we have bled and died that it not ‘perish from the Earth’. This crazy American experiment is WORTH fighting for! It’s worth far more than just 10,000 tries – if for no other reason than so many have paid so dearly for it.
American government was never supposed to be on autopilot. But there’s nothing preventing us from switching it back off of autopilot, except us. We – not them. We can retake control of our government. Only those who wish for a different form of government benefit from our feelings of helplessness – those feelings are understandable – but they are lies.
We the People govern this nation. That power is NOT irretrievably lost. We just have to do our jobs – it’s very simple just not very easy. Mopping up after the mess rarely is easy. But it’s always possible.
This is the mission of Quill Sword – informing people about HOW to use the tools available to us to regain control of our wayward government. Civil tools for civil government – because they work. Because they are part of the messy business of governing ourselves without tearing ourselves apart.
Because the American Experiment and the American Way are worth it.