To be safe is to be free.
How we choose to defend ourselves and those we care about defines what we value as a person, as a community, as a nation, and as a world.
Our choices affect not only each individual life but all life and that requires deep thought about the actions we are willing to take to ensure our mutual safety.
The Declaration of Independence is more relevant to our current situation than the Constitution, and I encourage you to read it in its entirety.
Through our lack of attention to the truth of our daily lives, we have allowed ourselves to be bound by political bands rather than by the truths we hold to be self-evident.
But don’t stop reading there, because Thomas Jefferson knew that human beings would be “more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they have become accustomed.”
We are not safe due to a repeated history of “injuries and usurpations,” most notably: dangerous suppression of freedom of the press and control of the media that require commentators to spin, not report, the truth; our abdication of individual power to our elected representatives, who achieve and retain their power through their dependence on the billions of corporate dollars that finance their campaigns, and to the appointed officials, who too often represent those same corporate interests; the nomination of a justice to the Supreme Court in the midst of an election.
Joy Beaver
Sequim