July 2, 2005 -- What do we celebrate on this coming Fourth of July, called Independence Day?  What does this country’s birth and progress mean to the world?

In its inception, beginning with the “discovery” by Christopher Columbus, of the “New World,” it meant genocide.  It meant the plunder, rape, and destruction of societies and civilizations that had existed in this hemisphere for millennia, for the purpose of taking gold and slaves back to Europe.

In the colonization of North America, this country’s birth was joined with the genocide necessary for territorial expansion to the slavery of Africans, abducted and transported under conditions of astounding cruelty, who built the economy of the new nation.

The Declaration of Independence, standing alone, was indeed a remarkable document.  It articulated, in the context of a world in which the divine right of monarchies was commonly accepted, the most basic and yet revolutionary concepts of individual human rights and dignity yet known in the world.  That these principles were so eloquently stated by slave owners, the majority of whom simply resented the rule of the British monarchy from across the sea, and the taxation of their wealth by that monarchy, does not diminish the truths they so powerfully asserted.

We have come to a time when those truths should be restated, in the context of these times, for the purpose of uniting all of us who know that the principles for which this document stands have been negated by those who now rule us without our informed consent.  For this reason, I have rewritten much of the Declaration of Independence, for the present day, and for the revolution we know is necessary.

Happy Fourth of July.

A Declaration of Independence for the 21^st Century

When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for humanity to dissolve the political and economic bands of power which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station to which their humanity and the powers and the necessity of the survival of their existence on earth entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of humanity requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all human beings were born as equals on this planet, and that they possess certain inalienable rights, that among these are Life, and all that is necessary to sustain life – housing, food, medical care – Liberty – to be themselves, to speak their minds, and to live where and as they wish and can do so, regardless of race, gender, or sexual orientation – and the pursuit of such Happiness as they may find on the path that they choose or to which they may seem destined by birth, genetics, or temperament, within the bounds of the safety and respect for the same rights of those within their communities and throughout the world.

That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among people, and that those governments must exist only as they are governed and led by the people.

That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the Right and Responsibility of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute a new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes, and accordingly all experience has shown that humanity is more disposed to suffer, while evils and exploitation are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing all forms to which they are accustomed.

But when a long train of abuses and disruptions of human rights and dignity, pursuing invariably the same Object of global corporate fascist dictatorship, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute slavery, Despotism, and even annihilation of the sustaining powers of the very planet upon which they live, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their security.

Such has been the patient sufferance of the citizens of the United States of America, and of those of the countries whose governments retain common economic and military bonds with it, and now is the necessity which constrains U.S. citizens, and those of the world, to alter their former Systems of Government.  The history of the present President of the United States, and of its former leaders, is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations of the lives and liberties of human beings the world over, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over not only the citizens of the United States of America, but of the entire planet.  To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refuted his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has obstructed, by media manipulation and intimidation, and through political and economic duress, the passage of Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation until his Assent, and that of his corporate sponsors, should be obtained, and when so suspended, he has then negated them with carefully constructed lies and propaganda, dutifully propagated to the people by his and his corporate cronies’ lapdog “news” and commentary instruments.  When so suspended, he has declared that those suspensions are not only the will of the people whom he has deceived, but that of a creator whom he does not know, and has utterly neglected to attend to them.

He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large groups of people, unless those people would relinquish the Rights of Representation in Government, and even their own civil liberties, and when so suspended, he has asserted that that suspension is for their own safety, due to a phantom threat of “terrorism”, a practice that has been, for centuries, exercised at home and abroad by his own corporate-controlled government, for the fortunes of the few, at the expense of the many.  Those rights that have historically been denied to the many, have been denied because they pose a formidable threat to the tyranny of the few.

He has called together legislative bodies, composed of “captains of industry” and other oligarchs, at unusual, inaccessible, and distant places from those of the working class who produce the wealth by which those oligarchs are able to meet and make the decisions affecting the working class, and the masses of the people, for the sole purpose of exhausting and intimidating them, through the use of police and military forces paid by the oligarchs, into reluctant resignation with his measures and those of other capitalist heads of governments with whom he is allied.

He has, through intimidation and bribery, dissolved any semblance of representative government in this country, for the advocates of such government’s courageous acts of opposition to his invasions upon the rights of the people.

He has then arranged for others to be elected, by means which negate the will of the people, those whose Legislative Powers, incapable of Annihilation but by those who hold capital and power, to rule without contest, and to wreak havoc upon the world, inciting the worlds’ peoples to just retaliatory incentives, thus exposing the People of the United States to all the dangers of invasion from without, and, by his rhetoric of polarization, convulsion from within.

He has represented as “enemies” those who, like all but those whose ancestors inhabited this continent for millennia, have come to this continent to work for sustenance, citizenship, and freedom.  He has made their exodus to this country, propelled by the same hardships and hopes that populated it with so many of its present inhabitants, illegal and punishable, in the name of an endless war upon the threat of “terrorism,” by which he defines any threat to the capitalist hegemony of his corporate cronies throughout the world.

He has obstructed the Administration of Justice by his appointment of judiciary personnel who have served corporate interests at the expense of human rights and the just interests of the workers, whose labor enriches those corporate interests, bullying and propagandizing their appointments through the easily manipulated Congress that We, the People, have been led to believe represent us.

He has established the PATRIOT ACT, erecting a multitude of new offices and oppressors of the people, to strip from them their civil liberties, and with powers hitherto unexercised, at least in a publicly demonstrable way.  These powers of surveillance and oppression of those who would exercise their rights are now threatened under the guise of, once more, a war on “terrorism”, a practice instituted and perfected in the inception and throughout the history of the empire he represents.

He has kept among us police in riot gear at our just demonstrations of protest against his abuses and excesses, without our consent, and has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to Civil Power.  He has then used the fear inspired by his rhetoric against “terrorism”, engendered by his and his predecessors’ own policies, and manipulated and used by them, to militarize our society and recruit our children, in times of economic desperation, also engendered by him and his predecessors, to kill the children in those countries targeted for economic and political exploitation, and, in turn to be killed.

We, the People of the United States of America, live under a tyranny of corporate-sponsored propaganda that commits and justifies criminal offenses against humanity, perpetuated by those who would claim to represent our interests and needs.  We do now declare, and are prepared to act upon, our Declaration of Independence from those who would take the product of our work for their own greed, the lives of our children for their own wars of corporate hegemony, and the good will and unity with others like us on this planet for their own destructive and nihilistic ends.

We are all Chavistas, Zapatistas, illegal immigrants, Palestinians, Iraqis, Afghanis, Haitians, Salvadorans, Guatemalans, Aceh separatists.  We must all be revolutionaries for a better world for ourselves and for our children, and for the Seventh Generation.  Many of us may not know it yet, but we will.

When the truth does come to us, in the form of a military draft, and/or an economic meltdown, which we all know is eminent, my greatest hope, and the thing for which I work, is that we will, indeed, unite and act upon it.  I live for the day when we will realize that all of us who work, all of us who produce the wealth of this country, will have one heart, and will speak with one voice, and claim our place as the true and legitimate rulers of the United States of America.

This shall, and must, be our new Declaration of Independence.

The People, United, Will Never Be Defeated!

El Pueblo, Unido, Jamas Sera Vencido!

© Copyright 2005 by AxisofLogic.com

Bio and additional essays by Beth Moore