7/4/10

The American Revolution is still happening

The reading of the Declaration of Independence by members of the reporting staff at NPR 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?

Mexico is a failed state. Mexicans know it and We the People know it. Let's ask our neighbors to petition for Statehood, join US with two Senators, the requisite number of Representatives, and continue the American Revolution for the Life, Liberty, and Pursuit of Happiness with Liberty and Justice for All.

Can the US Constitution handle it?

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Are you saying, "Resistance is futile?"

larry kurtz said...

Good question; ip has long argued that America is the Borg.

Maybe a better declarative would be, "Entropy is futile."

Anonymous said...

There seems to be an entire body of work surrounding this topic. Isn't there a compulsory English language requirement for Statehood?

larry kurtz said...

I haven't been able to find any language in the Enabling Act that requires English. In fact, there are many States where aboriginal tongues are still widely spoken; Alaska, Hawaii, South Dakota, and Arizona among them.