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PRESENT DAY 74: Kamala Harris, Tim Walz and the Pursuit of Happiness
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
A couple of days ago (chapter 572) I was talking about the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence. “Self-evident” caught my eye because the current corrupt Supreme Court is acting as if there’s no such thing. They claim to be “originalists” but they’re only originalists when it suits their radical right agenda. They also claim to favor states rights but that, too, is subject to their radical agenda. They claim that all they did was honor the idea of states rights when they granted states the power to take away a woman’s right to make her own healthcare decisions. We can only hope that states don’t decide to bring slavery since as far as this court is concerned, it’s up to them. But forcing their ideas about abortion down our throats is part of their Christian nationalist agenda and they’re just using the ruse of states rights to do that to all of us eventually. Their feigned reverence for states right then fell aside, of course, when it came to keeping Trump on the ballot. They threw Colorado’s rights aside when they overruled that state’s Supreme Court’s determination that Trump violated the 14th amendment, something which is self-evident to anyone alive and awake on J6 or who paid even the slightest attention to Trump’s second impeachment trial or to the findings of the J6 commission. Clearly it’s the agenda that counts for this “Supreme” court, not the constitution.
IMAGE INSERTED: The Trump 6:
Top: Alito, Roberts, Thomas, Barrett
Bottom: Gorsuch, Kavanaugh
But the US Constitution is a remarkable document even if it’s nothing more than an excuse for frivolous and disingenuous argument to the Trump 6. Self-evident isn’t the only remarkable part of the Declaration quoted above. Note that in the 18th century it was common practice in English (as in German) to capitalize nouns. Every noun but two in the sentence above is capitalized. “Creator” isn't capitalized because it revers to a divine being of some sort. Like rights, life, liberty and happiness it’s capitalized simply because it’s a noun. Though modern translations often capitalize only the word “Creator” for the same reason that modern versions of the Pledge of Allegiance add “under God,” i.e., in an attempt to brainwash us with religious dogma, that was not the original intent. The Founders were going out of their way to avoid giving their documents a Christian sheen. “Creator” is a generic term that might apply to any creature in any religion deemed to be the being responsible for the existence of the world in which we live. No doubt the Christian nationalists on the “Supreme” Court, the Trump 6, would argue disingenuously to the contrary. Note all of the capitalization going on in original versions of the Declaration - you’ll have to use the zoom in this one but there are many on line:
IMAGE INSERTED: Declaration of Independence as originally presented to Congress
In spite of the desperate desire of the Trump 6 to try to define the United States as a Christian country, the Founders didn’t want to limit the meaning of the Declaration to any specific religion. They therefore used a generic term for “god” rather than “God” or “Jehovah,” which, as I said before, would have been the Christian thing to do. “Happiness,” too, is a generic, undefined term. “Life” seems pretty straightforward. If we’re alive, have a right to stay alive. No despot has the right to slay us on a whim as had been the custom in most places around the world prior to 1776. Kings, pharaohs, caliphs, emperors, et al. ruled with an absolute Power which gave them Immunity to Prosecution, which is why there was no such thing as the prosecution of these tyrants. But this is just the sort of immunity the Trump 6 are determined to resuscitate though the Founders were doing their best to specifically rule that out. How do you know a Trump 6 justice is lying? Their lips are moving, of course. That murder should be illegal is a no-brainer given that we have an inalienable right to life but again, the Trump 6 are scratching their heads over that one. Life is freedom from being killed, something the Trump 6 clearly dislikes.
IMAGE INSERTED: Justice Warren Burger on the 2nd Amendment
Their lies about the second amendment have meant that Americans get mass murdered every day at an alarming rate. They’ve also gone so far as to legalize murder in certain situations as was shockingly proven by the Kenosha killer, who murdered two people but was let go because of absurd “stand your ground” laws. It was somehow decided that a man with a skateboard was a deadly threat to a man with a high-powered rifle rather than the other way around. “Liberty,” on the other hand, is a word they like. MAGA speak seems to prefer “liberty” to “freedom” and “liberties” to “freedoms,” though they seem to like counting “freedoms” more than they like the noncount noun “freedom,” which is apparently too all-inclusive for them. They want to count their freedoms because they want to pick and choose just which ones we have a right to and which we don’t. Not that I’m particularly fluent in MAGA speak. I haven’t spent much time on Fox or right wing radio but I have noticed that they also prefer “republic” to “democracy” though the reason for that one seems pretty obvious. They don’t like democracy at all because it clearly puts power in the hands of everyone, including people they don't like, and so they prefer a republic where power rests in the hands of their own preferred few, Trump and his cronies at the moment. Having been programmed by Fox, Limbaugh and company to hate Democrats, a hatred of democracy naturally follows. They don't seem to notice that hatred for democracy is a hatred for the institutions that are the foundation of the country they claim to love. Like their “Supreme” Court, it’s their agenda, not the reality of the Constitution, that counts. But the Founders did take “liberty” to be one of those self-evidently unalienable rights and must have realized that there would be those wanting to do the picking and choosing for us. Hence the Bill of Rights. But I've always taken the term “liberty” in more of a noncount noun way. I’ve always taken it to mean that we’re free to do what we like as long as we don’t violate the law. That definition, of course, is premised on the assumption that the rule of law is inviolable, something that MAGA world no longer seems to accept. They worship a leader, after all, who violates the law daily, whimsically with without shame, guilt or regret. Trump certainly does see himself as above the law, though he doesn’t see those he intends to round up for personal reasons in the same way. Anyone Trump doesn’t like is subject to the rule of law, his law, that is, not ours or the one developed over 240 years since the Founders tried to lay the groundwork for a government of laws rather than of imperial whim or delusional faith. Of these three unalienable Rights, however, to me the one clearly and intentionally not defined is the third, “the pursuit of happiness,” and that’s because “happiness” can mean so many different things. When they stated that “all Men are created equal,” they certainly knew what they meant by the word “Men.” They meant white men with Property. When they said ‘Happiness,” however, they must have meant it in the way that they had just used the term “Creator,” as something that they didn't wish to define too strictly. And that makes perfect sense. Happiness can be many things to many people. That must have been true even in the 18th century. Life and liberty, more easily defined, weren’t enough for the Founders. Those were just the baseline. They wanted us not to be merely alive and free but happy as well and this the Harris / Walz campaign seems to have tapped into. They talk about not just getting by but getting ahead. As Timothy Snyder says in his new book On Freedom, they talk about not just being free From but being free To. (Maybe in the 21st century it’s the prepositions rather than the nouns that ought to be capitalized.) Life is freedom from murder. Liberty is freedom from intrusions on our privacy. The pursuit of happiness, however, is freedom to decide what sort of person we want to be and then take the steps to be that person. For this reason the Founders made no attempt to define the term “happiness" but left it to us to make that determination. Neither does this sit well with the Trump 6, who, along with legalizing discrimination on religious grounds, have gone out of their way and out of the Constitution’s way to give Trump the power to stop anyone from doing anything at all that he doesn't like. This is the real motive behind their absurd immunity ruling. They want to be in control of the freedom To. They do this knowing that Biden will not abuse power as Trump has and would again given the chance. They're counting on Trump’s getting another chance. Standing in their way are Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, who are appealing not just to the goodness in us but to the goodness in the Declaration and in the Constitution. The goodhearted, honest and compassionate are coming out this year to defeat the toxic curse of Trump and his ilk precisely because we have the freedom to do that (at least for now). We have the unalienable Right to pursue our Happiness and that means voting for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. Freeing ourselves of Trump can be done in November. It will take longer to get those with ill-will off the Supreme Court, possibly a generation of struggle against six people who, like Trump, believe they are above the law in spite of the fact that they’ve taken an oath to uphold it. Just as Trump lied his way through the oath of office, these Trump 6 lied their way through their confirmation hearings in front of the Senate and now thumb their noses even at ethical rules that honest people have no trouble at all following. But we’ll pursue Happiness as the Founders intended, part of which for the Majority of Americans is to rid the country of the scourge of the Trump 6. That’s a Happiness truly worth pursuing. Electing Harris and Walz while jailing Trump will be a giant step in that direction. Replacing Alito, Thomas, Roberts, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett will be another.
P.S. The two nouns not capitalized, by the way, are “truths” and “men.” Why that is, I don't know. If anyone can shed light on this, please do.
IMAGES INSERTED: The Trump “Supreme” Court