Democracy and Identity in America
I was never very interested in history as a high school and college student. It was always presented in a rather boring way. In retrospect, American History seems like it was offered to me as something that I shouldn’t look too closely at. I came into adulthood thinking about Washington, Jefferson, Madison and Franklin, and much later Hamilton, as these enlightened, pro-people, revolutionaries. They started a revolution for the common man- even though I always understood it was the common white man- and by man, they definitely didn’t mean women.
They wrote, “…all men are created equal.” We fought the British for this idea and for freedom, right?
That was an unquestioned part of my identity as an American up until very recently. Maybe it’s because of my age, maybe I was paying much closer attention to our system as Donald Trump worked to push it toward a totalitarian dictatorship, maybe it’s because of the Black Lives Matter movement and Anti Racism, maybe it’s because our country is finally starting to talk more about its past in an attempt to repair deep damage done. I don’t know why it’s happening now, but I am hearing more and more about the true beliefs of America’s founding fathers, and their purposefully controlling design of our allegedly democratic system. This new information - undeniable documentation from their own writing - is affecting me and I wonder if it’s affecting others who come across it.
These ideas about our democracy are well laid out in Scene on Radio, Season 4. I highly recommend it! Specifically, the story about the British Proclamation of 1763. George Washington was a British soldier, fighting against the French and Indigenous folks on the American Frontier, in what is now Ohio and Pennsylvania. The British promised to pay him and other prominent generals in land that they captured. This was, of course, indigenous land. Once these wars were over the British declared that they would not pay the general in land. They had determined that taking land from the indigenous people would destabilize the region and make it easy for the French and the Spanish to return and take it back. So they told the wealthy general that he wasn’t going to be paid in land after all. This outraged General Washington. He was an aspiring oligarch at the time and wanted to expand his land holdings. He didn’t think that the common people should have the right to vote. He wasn’t interested in Enlightenment ideas about the common man. He just wanted to get paid. This was the main reason he decided to enter the revolution. Once we won the Revolutionary War, he was free to collect his land from the indigenous people and to sell it off. And all the while, he was using slave labor at his plantation.
So, now, my identity as an American is shifting. I see us as living in an oligarchy that was planned from the start. We were not meant to be purely democratic. We are not the world’s greatest democracy. I have been lied to, or I have been a poor student. It’s time to question all of my beliefs about the system I live in. Are you ready to question these ideas and make a change?
It turns out striving for true democracy is a lot of hard work. Paying attention to how our government treats our most vulnerable citizens is a responsibility that I’m starting to take more seriously. It doesn’t just happen. Voting rights are at risk in many states. But there are opportunities to step forward, and work to make changes happen. There are groups you can join. There are local politicians who are trying to make something different happen. There are organizations looking for volunteers and donations. If we don’t work at it, we won’t get it.
Who are you and who do you want to be?
