We The People never actually did the constitutions as intended. We never extended the freedoms we cherished to those we disliked (Injuns, Darkies, Micks, Wops, Chinks, Bohunks, Catholics, Jews, etc., etc., et cetera…), and so the whole point of constitutional rule of law was compromised from the start.

In empowering a government to degrade or oppress anybody, we created a baby monster. That monster would grow up, of course.

Well, maybe not so much a baby monster. I think for present purposes I’ll ignore our government’s first centuries of slavery, native genocide/oppression, what happened with Civil War and Jim Crow, and move on to what we think of as our more pleasant selves.

From 1910-1912, we feared occasional interruptions to history’s greatest economic expansion, so we surrendered our successful monetary/financial system to central banking and fiat currency through a political system of monetized debt. This was also, not so coincidentally, how we could “pay” off previous wars and prepare for “modern warfare” in the future… by robbing the future.

Not long after that, our fear of drunkenness led to the prohibition of “…the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors.” While this first prohibition of any sort of trade didn’t involve prohibiting consumption or purchase of anything, those additional prohibitions came as if by magic, along with rampant “civil asset forfeiture,” police and judicial corruption, and the presumption that government can prohibit other trade even after the 18th amendment was repealed by the 21st.

From WWI to WWII, our fear of Germans, Arabs, Italians and Japanese temporarily distracted us from our hatred/fear of Native Americans, Negroes and Jews, so our government took away our gold, rationed and prohibited a bunch of stuff, raised taxes dramatically, started “socializing” the heck out of stuff, and imposed lots of laws against speech and movement and so on. But we were pretty proud after kicking some @$$…though we did, of course, fear commies (our allies just moments earlier) after that.

So some more liberties had to be curtailed, naturally. That’s war, you know. Sometimes past mistakes rationalize making more in the future.

But by the 60’s we no longer feared alcohol, because we now fear drugs.

So we got SWAT teams, Nixon’s “War on Drugs,” and a thriving black market in …drugs. And all without amending the constitution this time!

Police forces grew exponentially in size, armament, and since the 1980’s…immunity.

By the 80’s we feared black markets and drug dealers so much that we got more sting operations, spying, unlimited “civil asset forfeiture” and no-knock raids.

From the 70’s, when we tied our money to Saudi oil trade, through the 90’s, when some uppity Muslims challenged our petrodollar system, we decided that the people we’d been relocating for a hundred years, then overthrowing and manipulating with the Saudis, were “terrorists,” and THEY became our biggest fear…for which we’ve had to sacrifice innumerable freedoms of travel, privacy and finance.

Then after 9/11…ho boy!

Now the NSA has replaced Santa Claus as the keeper of lists, and you really don’t have any constitutional freedoms at all anymore. You’ve got only conditional privileges with ever-more conditions on ever-fewer privileges.

Strangely, instead of thanking our nation’s founders, constitution’s authors and civil rights heroes for the freedoms we’ve been throwing away, we thank soldiers fighting foreigners in foreigners’ own homes. …Fighting wars that rationalize the loss of more freedoms.

(how can we make this make sense?)

So now we’ve got this really bad case of cooties, and we’re snitching on each other like CoroNazis, and trying our best to shovel even more power onto the authoritarians when that’s now becoming a very hard thing to do.

Not to minimize how deadly a pandemic can be, of course. With my first political campaigns, I tried to make an issue of our lack of preparedness for just such things (my first real job in healthcare was an internship at the Indiana State Board of Health, after all).

If you really want to live scared, communicable disease actually is a worthy terror.

Apparently that’s not enough fear, however, because we’ve lately replaced our fear of Russia with the fear of China. In some ways, that makes sense. China’s much more dangerous now that we’ve given them at least close equivalence in economic, industrial, entertainment, information/ education, engineering and of course military/espionage might. They could danged-near build a human bridge across the Pacific and kick our @$$.

But what you really should fear is that, as China has to an effective degree emulated our industries and market economics, We The People have emulated Chinese brutality, deceit and authoritarianism.

We’ve thus thrown away our economy, and our freedom.

…Oh, and our security.

Sure, we’ve angered the whole world by putting our forces in half the world with the guns pointed at the other half. Our wars never end…even after our President/General Eisenhower warned us about the danger of a military industry.

But worse, all the preceding has rationalized more enforcement, more force, an increasingly adversarial relationship between us and the police and our “National Guard” forces.

Bad laws drive away good cops and encourage bad cops. Too many laws mean selective enforcement, which is a major foothold for corruption and racism/tribalism. And corrupt, continuously re-elected and therefore arrogant and unaccountable politicians want thugs and the fear they spread…it’s what gives politicians power over us.

Our collective fear, ignorance, tribalism and hate is leading us to a very, very, historically, epically bad place. Only politicians thrive on our division, hostility, fear and hatred. They feed and grow more powerful on our discord the way a tick drinks blood.

Our nation’s founders would be ashamed at not only the destruction of their gifts to us, but also that we’ve not come up with any better vision by now. They’d be horrified that we’re fighting each other instead of the forces that divide us against each other.

We could easily fix things at least to fundamental principles. I’m not the only one who for decades has proposed simple ways to govern our government, regulate our regulators, police our police, and make our justice system just.

But it seems us Cassandra types have naught to do now but prepare for what’s now inevitable, and maybe prepare to help pick up the pieces… …If people become any more amenable to reason after catastrophe than they are now.

Sigh… We can’t be the Land of The Free if we’re not also the Home of The Brave. I’m afraid we’ve become the Land of the Sheep and the Home of the Fraidy Pants.

As demonstrated every Election Day, including the next one, by all the evidence I see, We The People don’t seem to want any regulation of our government at all. We want authoritarian rule and we want it good and hard.

Over 90% of us incessantly blow electoral kisses to the Powers That Be…and then whine about the consequences.

And those consequences have only just barely started to show…

Hang onto your hats.

They may be all that’s left after we’re done doing to ourselves what we have always feared from others.