The red sun rises on a blood strewn battlefield, with the fresh carnage still rotting in what would be eventually a monument to fallen souls, whose sacrifice of blood and sinew would heal the gashes and mend the bones of a nation torn asunder by apathy and indecisiveness. A demigod of a man, crowned in a tall cap of black leather and wreathed in his majestic black beard rises to the podium, and a hush falls across the yard, silent as the grave itself. They are waiting. The radiance of charisma has woven the spell of silence amongst the boisterous and the timid alike, as all tremble with the anticipation of what this apostle would say.

Seven score and ten years ago. Yet, despite the baptism in blood of a newly “united” states, rising as a phoenix does on the ashes and carcasses of its own brethren, the apathetic have found a way to linger on. Slinking in and out of our grasp, the sly fox has remained, the voice of ignorance and inaction that broke once the bonds of fellowship we hold so dear, that unmade the wedding ring of power that the states of this union once wore with pride, the ghost of this spirit lived on through the war meant to purge it, whilst our families watched in horror as their sons turned on one another and by the slice of the bayonet and the shot of the rifle, the bond of kinship and liberty shattered into the thousand remnants of shrapnel that would pierce the hide of our nation. The cannon may have been destroyed, but its legacy, in the crippling blow it dealt, may indeed be the cause of more pain and suffering than was alleviated in the decimation of the fortress from whence the cannon was fired. Now rebuilt, the fortresses of hypocrisy and ignorance, bastions for the small minded, fanatical and power hungry, stand grander than ever, and once again though each of us is equipped with the armaments needed to rend once again these imposing figures, each soul cowers in the darkness, their heart giving way and either is welcomed with open arms into Troy, or simply does he squeal and flee the battlefield that we must all sally forth on, lest we descend into the chaos that becomes the fall of a great empire. If the regulators of the people are to be the people, then we must find it in our hearts to regulate and fight against the blatant encroachment of ignorance and apathy, the very forces that would seek to contaminate the noble experiment until nothing remains but a wasteland riddled with political fallout and the carcasses of ever more hysterical rhetoric lacking in the wisdom and composure that becomes a leader of moral and sound nature. As the clouds of war gather above and the sun sets on the nation, can the empire find it in the hearts of the people to last the night and see the dawn shine more radiant than ever a light had shone with each proud ray of the sun a beacon to safe harbor and the ever present vigor of the American spirit, or will the empire descend into the chaos and abyss that has greeted all other such behemoths since the days of Caesar?

The noble experiment since its inception has been a humanist crusade for morality and justice in a world of corruption and selfish narcissism. As the monarchs of Europe languished in the lavish mirrored halls of their palaces feeding into their own sense of entitled superiority, a fire fueled not by oil, but by the fat, flesh and blood of the proletariat masses growing more discontent each passing day, as these self-same monarchs feathered the goose down pillows and sewed the crisp linen sheets of their deathbeds, across the sea a light glimmered as a revelation was passed down from the heavens and an enlightened group of demigods principled a government based on trust of the people. Or did they? Truly when fashioning the government by the people and for the people, one must inherently hold self-evident the truth that all men are created equal, endowed with certain unalienable rights, for each man, woman and child, regardless of age or color of skin, had indeed the same potential to contribute to society, but in the eyes of the framers of the people’s government the masses were not a group to be trusted, and they must cede the reins to the already powerful in exchange for the promise of the possibility to rise up and become themselves among the powerful that lorded over the “free” peasantry.

Knowledge and morals forsaken, the new deity of the nation became the dollar bill and the promise of power that came with it, and through this ever more violent quest for resources and power the very human foundations of the government were forgotten as all was swept up in the tornado of paper that storms across each of our hearts. Government by the people and most importantly for the people, was the phrasing of the original vision of the nation we call home, and yet, somewhere along the path, the translation has lost the crucial sentiment, as so often is the case, and more and more, government for the people has become governing for the people a simple change of part of speech that replaces a vigorous and innovative society, ever pulsing with the hot blood of political life and fervor, with a stagnant cesspool of decomposing institutions and antiquated politicians spewing forth the ideas of the past millennia in addition to the spittle and bile of age. The pillars of wisdom, morality and justice, once crowned in golden laurels and guarded by proud and steadfast sentinels, now lie cracked and rotting as the very guards took leave and relaxed their grip, resting themselves instead on the very flowers of the pillars they were entrusted with, and when called upon once more to report for service, so long had they been out of commission that they were scarcely needed any longer, for what is left to defend but a forsaken pile of rubber and plaster where once the virtues of a nation stood.

The human potential of the nation now lost and forgotten, the politics of reality have become indeed a simple horse race with the politician a jockey for superficial position, a battle of image rather than ingenuity, a fight over visage and not vision, and one can scarcely wonder how it is that the houses of our government still stand when the foundation has been all but exhumed, and how the domes do manage to contain the egos of men and women within, who are more similar to self-inflated balloons than human beings, hollow within where knowledge and moral conviction should be, and when a simple decision or call to action comes their way, when the slightest tear or tribulation punctures the seamless and pristine nylon casing of these pompous windbags, do these cases of redundant and incoherent rhetoric deflate, with the force of the air caught within propelling them across the skies of the nation they were too represent, and in a way they do indeed represent it, for the state of the union has become such a sad order of affairs that indeed if one wished to represent the ignorant masses, schooled, and yet unable to think, human and yet more likely to consume plastic than any meaningful sustenance, and more captivated by the familiar name and the shining white teeth than the shining rhetoric of a new dawn of knowledge and prosperity.

If a government truly by the people and for the people is to not perish from the Earth, it falls to that government, and by definition thus, the people it represents, to carry forth the dual blades of knowledge and morality along with the banner of conviction into the charge and melee that is chaos, whose lords and ministers, ignorance and apathy await, growing steadily stronger with each passing day as each generation gives not way to change, but, rather, gives away, piece by piece, the powers of knowledge, and forsakes the simple human potential that we are all endowed with. It was once said, “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. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,” We have lost the track of our society in the money-mongering quest for power that is capitalism, that has turned brother against brother and parent against child in the barbaric crusade for sheets of dead trees instead of for the betterment of humanity, pursuing paper, not happiness until the humanity has been leeched dry from us as the life and bounty of the Earth itself is being leeched, and we watch as the government for the people becomes more and more a farce instituted now not for people but for the corporate elite that sees itself as the only ones fit for the term human, when none could be more inhumane than the exploitative aristocrats that are the antithesis not only of the proletariat endowed with the unalienable right to rule, but the antithesis of everything that make a nation of the people, and so the antithesis of the people themselves.