The
reading of the Declaration of Independence by members of the reporting staff at NPR on the 4th of July gets me every time. Past on-air personalities, some now correspondents at the pearly gates, also read for this decades-old feature. The tears stream down my face right up to the line that begins:
He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare…
That’s when it hits me right between the eyes.
When those words were being written, thousands of cultures inhabited a continent that seemed to keep growing huge ripe plums just waiting for Madison, Jefferson, Hamilton and the rest to pick and pick and pick and pick. Already, the Chesapeake Bay
estuary had been
mostly denuded of
native vegetation, not to mention of its
former human inhabitants.
Slaves tilled the fields and built the infrastructure, the ancestors of the Lakota and other Siouan groups that had been forced westward out of North Carolina generations earlier, traded with the Spanish and French while forging their own alliances (and marriages) with other indigenous peoples.
So, we’ve come a long way, init?
The United States Constitution is the finest instrument ever created by the human hand. The Preamble is the body, the Bill of Rights is the neck, the Amendments are the strings. It is a fluid universal execution of human and civil rights.
While the Palestinian homeland looks like
holes in the slice of Swiss cheese analogous to the illegal Israeli state, progress toward resolutions of Native trust disputes would have far more political traction after tribes secede from the States in which they reside and then be ratified to form one State, the 51st, sans contiguous borders with two Senators and two House members as there are an estimated 2.5 million indigenous.
It’s time for all Americans to enjoy the protection of law by being part of one nation: erase the artificial borders and grant
Life, Liberty and the
Pursuit of Happiness to all the people of
North America…
Mexico, Central America,
Canada, even the Caribbean if they’ll have us.
ip is
not a New World Order guy, does not support the North American Union (god bless you. please, mr. roddenberry) and believes that the US Constitution is a
big enough canvas in order to
paint a more perfect masterpiece, a
big enough score for
all to sing. No violence. No more drug wars.
Read
Alaska’s constitution some time. The last states ratified are the most egalitarian. Let’s debate it and draft a dream referendum to be delivered by and for the people of Mexico to dissolve their constitution and petition for Statehood as our 52nd State. Quebec could be the 53rd and Cuba, the 54th.
Let's do it.
