Resolved
Month: February 2025
The Will to Save Democracy
First, we must recognize the danger of this moment in history of the United States of America. I can think of no one better than Timothy Snyder, a Yale Professor recognized as one of our most effective voices on how democracies can die and how citizens can act to prevent it, to guide us in this moment. Dr. Snyder wrote On Tyranny and On Freedom – two small, powerful books with razor sharp vision of how democracy should act and how to spot its demise. Please check out his audio address from Ukraine on his “Thinking About” Substack account, linked below.
Read my recent Letter to U.S. Representative Jen A Kiggans. Hope you will write your representatives as well and call out all that we citizens see and know and remind them that the People run the government.
America As I Have Lived It
Personal Stories from Life in My Country, America…
I was born in the summer of 1945 at the tail end of WWII. My father was a B-29 pilot in the Army Air Corps flying missions in the Pacific. I would not comprehend this fact for many years as I grew in the ability to understand. However even as a 3 to 5 year old I recall standing under the massive wing of a B-29 during military ceremonies. Looking up at Dad in his dress blues and medals flashing light he was a god of war though he was a gentle parent.
Dad had decided to stay in the service. He loved to fly and America was the most powerful military in the world after the war. Our family possessed a strong love of country and pride in being an American.
Mom and Dad came from Southern families whose descendants were immigrants fleeing poverty and hunger. Their relatives in Western Europe risked everything to sail to this brand new country because of its promise. On both sides of my family, they had first generation experience of oppression, whether by oligarchs and tyrants, or by the Church.
America promised government by the people, for the people. Most struggled here as well in the beginning when only white men owning a certain amount of land could vote. However, there was the possibility of changing that law.
What the new American government envisioned were high ideals and virtuous conduct by leaders and citizens alike. Being realists, however, they formed a set of laws and checks and balances that would assure we met those ideals and conduct best we can, striving together.
As a child I learned about these ideals and laws gradually as I was old enough to understand them. My parents, teachers, church, community leaders, and civic groups a plenty (Brownies, Girl Scouts, Eagle Scouts, 4-H), clubs in high school and university: debate team, band and orchestra, honor societies, sororities and fraternities, etc.) were foundations for us kids coming up in a nation guided by those values and virtues our forefathers aspired to for the new nation.
America was and still is a dream we aspire toward, operating with the consent of the people and guarded by laws. As a child up to the age of 15, I felt safe and challenged to live as an American. I felt a responsibility to its continuation, emulating my parents and other adults in my small world. Community was what I remember the most. Cultivating a sense of responsibility toward others and toward our country.
This was a joyous habit of mind which we celebrated at home, school, church, community and as a nation. The 4th of July and my birthday just a day later, were often celebrated together. Perhaps that is why I have such love of America’s Constitution and its many institutions that cultivate the high calling of constant vigilance against tyranny that is the collective burden of all of us.
By the time I turned 16, I realized that being American was not something you get, like a diploma, but a lifelong commitment if we want to keep it. The dogs of war, greed and tyranny are always nipping at Liberty’s heels.
To be continued….
Historical Perspectives for Today’s Constitutional Crisis
Clay Jenkins with Joe Ellis on the 2024 Presidential Election.
Feet Solidly Set in Common Sense
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
–Preamble to the United States Constitution
She highlights how our founders explicitly did not base the government on morality because individuals’ sense of morality varies. This cannot be used for a system of laws that works for every citizen.
Then she turns to fascism and how it rises and why our founders set up a structure that empowers the people through elected representatives and seating power with the people – not with any particular person or party.
Facts are stubborn things; and whatever, and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence. ~ John Adams.
A Time Between
“We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.”
– Martin Luther King, Jr.
There is probably no other person like MLK, Jr. who knew the bleak landscapes of injustice yet held the dream that “one day little black boys and girls would hold hands with little white boys and girls.”
The vision he held advances, retreats, surges ahead with each decade of good hearted and prayerful striving. It all takes place in the heart.
When kindness and reciprocity advance the cause of freedom and liberty, we lean in toward justice. Now is a time of avarice and hoarding in which we lean outward away from each other. Justice retreats.
Freedom loving Americans, stand by Lady Liberty. The midterms – if the institution holds together – are the next vital space where we can lean together toward justice, truth and a kind but firm righting of all we hold dear. Fear not but be vocal, hold hands and keep the dream of Liberty forever alight in your heart. Let us lean in together.
A Coup on American Democracy
Timothy Snyder warns Americans that we do not recognize a new kind of Coup: It is digital. What’s at stake right now: 1) our Human Rights and 2) our Constitutional Rights.
Of Course Its a Coup
Thinking About: Timothy Snyder’s Substack
About Substack: This is a publishing platform. You can sign up for free with any of the individuals presenting news, culture, etc. When you sign up just click on free subscription to begin with. So no cost to you. Later, if you like the work that is being done on your behalf you may decide to donate monthly.
For Timothy Snyder I consider his work so valuable I subscribe. I was a free subscriber for a year before that.
Clear Vision from Timothy Snyder
“What is a country? The way its people govern themselves. America exists because its people elect those who make and execute laws. The assumption of a democracy is that individuals have dignity and rights that they realize and protect by acting together.
“The people who now dominate the executive branch of the government deny all of this, and are acting, quite deliberately, to destroy the nation. For them, only a few people, the very wealthy with a certain worldview, have rights, and the first among these is to dominate.
“For them, there is no such thing as an America, or Americans, or democracy, or citizens, and they act accordingly. Now that the oligarchs and their clients are inside the federal government, they are moving, illegally and unconstitutionally, to take over its institutions.”
To read more of this article from Dr. Snyder and to sign up for a free subscription to follow his posts- recommended during this time of total destruction of the institutions of democracy – click here:
Thinking About – Substack Account for Timothy Snyder
Susan Feathers 