The American Revolution is not over.
“He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian King of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where Men should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce. And that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he has obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed again the Liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.”
~Thomas Jefferson, 1776, Declaration of Independence (Removed)
Perhaps the most golden verse in our declaration of independence was withheld for pragmatic alliance with land holders that would allow us to free ourselves from the chains of the crown… but that we made this concession tells us that The American Revolution is not over, and it will not be over until we fulfill Jefferson’s vision where all humans are held to be equal.
To win a war you must make concessions. With North Carolina, Georgia and the American slavers inhabiting the north supporting the Crown, we would have lost the American Revolutionary War. Period. No history can say where the world would be at this time were that the case; but the bastion of learning, and the brilliant voices such as King, X, Farrakhan and so many others would not have emerged from the actions of emancipation and the civil war we fought to begin the long path of revolution in ourselves.
We stand now at a critical point where we must look at the nation that has become… stagNation arising from our excesses and our comfort. Be it a person intellectual or or a person enslaved, all here have stagnated. For the revolution has not found completion. Jefferson saw a land where all men are equal. And we have been fighting for that for over 200 years.
“all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free”
~Abraham Lincoln, 1863, Emancipation Proclamation
When we abolished slavery, we took simply the first step to realize Jefferson’s vision. 620,000 people died in a bloodbath that still carries a societal memory that makes all who know the stories uneasy. For some strange reason it took the deaths of half a million people to move forward to a place where a man can no longer OWN a human being. The two horrors resonate with each other; the horror of the death that it took to free ourselves of an idea that in itself is repugnant as the most basal level.
When we elected the first African American as President of the United States we reached the next milestone in the American revolution. We came closer to that original intent in our Declaration of Independence. We came closer to that dream where all humans are equal. And like all mileposts towards progress, there was fear, and with fear comes hate. Barack Obama had to live with over 30 death threats a day.
We knew in 2008 that Barack Obama was going to unmask the deep racism in our country. And it has. We are, at this moment dealing with this terrible truth that we have ignored by fixating on the at times pointless words of the 14th amendment. An amendment is not enough, laws are not enough, the revolution must be internalized.
Right now we are still on that Barack Obama milepost. While one person’s cohort is subjugated, none are free. All are still slaves of the crown. We give entitlement to those who are at the top of the pile, but here is the reality, while one is oppressed, none are free.
The American Revolution, like any revolution, is the revolution of the mind and soul, it is in the worlds of Jefferson, Lincoln and King, the point in which all humanity is equal. We are not done, we are perhaps even less than half way there, and I will not say that I am the one with answers.
What I will say is that no successful revolution ends with violent action. Revolutions end with unity. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had more than just a dream, he had a philosophy that is a solution, and that philosophy may be the capstone to the American Revolution. In his thought, we will say that revolution arises from the triple evils of Poverty, Racism and Militarism. King answers this not with more militarism, but with Six Principles of Social Change: Information Gathering, Education, Personal Commitment, Discussion & Negotiation, Direct Action and finally Reconciliation.
As we move forward into the very uncomfortable 21st century, we must step forward and complete the American Revolution. We are a people who have declared that ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all (hu)men are created equal’ . And to fulfill this belief we must move forward to a place of peace. Revolutions are not street battles or wars, while that is oft the necessary first stage; we must move beyond this to the path of peace, to embrace the revolution of the soul, a point in time where human consciousness transforms.
We just woke up from the American dream, and in this terrible waking moment, we have an opportunity to make this a reality.
I pray we live to see this day.
“When we allow freedom to ring-when we let it ring from every city and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, “Free at last, Free at last, Great God a-mighty, We are free at last.”
~Martin Luther King, 1963, I Have A Dream
