Dear Mr. Franklin,
As it turns out, America doesn’t want to keep it.
I know you didn’t have any sense of what was to come with the Industrial Revolution and capitalism in the form of corporate hegemony, and along with it relatively unregulated commerce and its influences on governance and media. This system brought amazing advances that made life more safe, more entertaining and convenient, but that also has seemingly eroded the mind and heart to the point of indifference to others and a rather disinterest in the future.
Over time we have weakened our education system and forgot, or many never learned or cared, about the underlying principles of a democracy and why you all fought and thought so hard to begin it.
It’s a testament to the ignorance and indifference that a capitalist economy generates, with its priority on profit at all costs, rising wealth and income gaps, to the consequences for others and the environment, and unregulated social media (I will explain the internet another time) and false advertising.
In this environment, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer…both of which push us broadly toward more regressive forms of governance and education, which the rich use to keep the masses ignorant and malleable. One person in particular has been especially effective at tapping into the grievances those people feel or convince them to feel emotions they otherwise would not, meanwhile doing nothing to actually help improve their lives. This dynamic of false stories and human emotion has in fact recently plummeted to new depths and keeps the masses imprisoned and chained to those with the levers of the conversation.
The power of the rich with their hands on the reigns of government, both directly and indirectly, and weaponry the likes I believe are unimaginable in your time, and other forms of softer might, make any form of change FOR, BY and OF the people all that much more difficult. But maybe that’s what you meant by “IF you can keep it.”
Ultimately, Mr. Franklin, these systems of governance and economy, in their current and intertwined form, without proper guardrails, seem not able to long stand. Together they are self-destructive, not just socially as mentioned above, but also environmentally. The advances in technology that you can’t imagine we have now, have enabled massive amounts of ecological destruction for the sake of short-term profits without concern about what is ahead. We call nature “resources” when she is the air we breathe, the food that sustains us, the water that enables our biological systems to function and the larger systems of our ecology to sustain itself. We are fundamentally altering the health of the planet in ways that you would find disheartening, to say the least. And most of us in this modern age of convenience and selfishness have lost the capacity and desire to understand and connect with the natural world from which we rose.
Meanwhile, we have reached a tipping point for so many areas of ecological health that will affect the future…and our place within it. Instead of seeing and valuing this, we have instead chosen to disregard it and pretend that the state of our ecology will not affect our lives, regardless of what scientists have been warning. Yes scientists, such as yourself, Mr Franklin, have been telling us for 50 years or more the dire consequences of today’s capitalist society…but we don’t want to listen.
It is this level of ignorance and indifference to others, ourselves and our ecology, that it seems democracy mixed with capitalism has resulted in. Combined with the not-so-advanced human brain, this dynamic of willful ignorance and self-profit at all costs, has turned on the foundations of society itself.
There is a notion called “Tragedy of the Commons” that recognizes that a common good, whatever it might be, will be used up by the community’s constituents without regard for what is needed to maintain the community itself. The common good is consumed by each constituent seeking to benefit from that use, until the community can no longer function or maybe exist. This could be physical such as clean air or water or ecology as a whole, or could be social in regard to the state of mental health, collectively and individually, or could be economically such as the fair level of living standards and of course levels of inputs from nature. Here, I am referring to all of them and the violation of the norms and practices of democracy that you and many others carved into the constitution so intentionally.
Oh, Mr. Franklin, I’m sorry if all this reads a little odd. It’s just that the world has changed so much in the past 248 years. Over that time we grew in population from 800 million people globally to 8 billion. That’s a tenfold increase in just 250 years whereas, it took humans 2,800 years to increase from 80 million to 800 million. That’s just one change, but you can imagine how that’s warped our sense of reality. We have become completely self-consumed and I dare say self-loathing.
It’s hard to tell you simply how destitute our souls have become. King George III was a tyrant in your day, but he didn’t have the capability to move so quickly to destroy the fabric of human society and the environment as today, and to manipulate others into doing the same. There are terms we use to describe this such as a “cult.” I’m not sure if this word was around in your time but such a thing can be powerful and was even used almost a hundred years ago to commit mass atrocities and genocide in Europe as well as start a very destructive global war.
Now, as opposed to your time, one doesn’t need to be born King to become King. If they have enough money and power, they can simply claim they were anointed by God to manipulate enough people to believe them and coerce others to carrying on the farce. You’d be surprised to learn that such a person can also be a convicted felon under the same common law system you revere so much, yet still run for and be elected to the Presidency. This person has even referred to our fallen patriots who defend our democracy as “suckers and losers.” Please don’t share this with General Washington, he would be horrified.
It’s all about money, Mr. Franklin. And as I write that it occurs to me that your face adorns the $100 bill. There is a modern saying “It’s all about the Benjamins, baby,” which became the title to a song and apparently a movie. This is not a reflection of how you are viewed just about the priorities today’s society holds around money. In truth, it’s an embarrassment and a realistic caricature of ourselves.
But even the legal system itself has been perverted and corrupted by these same systemic influences of a capitalist society, and it feels like the essence of the checks and balances and the principles you helped to frame so well, are crumbling before us.
Although I know you and John Adams found yourselves at odds during the diplomatic trips to France, he made an insightful and oft-quoted statement: “We are a nation of laws, not of men.” That aspiration has taken a severe blow over the past eight years.
Ah but I’m rambling now. In short, good sir, the society you helped to forge, with all of its principles and ideals, has been hijacked by the greed and thoughtlessness and callousness of humans, atop a system of entitlement they’ve been told they should expect to reap from, while being filled with notions of grievance, even if fabricated by those in power to control or even enslave others.
This dark side of human emotions appears much stronger than those principles and egalitarian precepts you promoted. As an aside, there’s a movie called Star Wars, and a thing in it called the Force…it kinda of matches where we are…but I won’t bore you with that tale. You can download it from any number of streaming…ah forget it.
I don’t know what’s ahead, I just thought you should know where we are right now. There’s a lot of fear and concern because the heart of humanity has seemingly been hollowed out. And it’s all happening so fast. Maybe we will recover from this someday but we are at a point where social, economic and environmental collapse seem all but inevitable.
I just thought you should know. It’s a difficult time to see what has happened and I’m sorry to have bothered you with this news. You are held in such high regard, and always will be, even if most people seem to have forgotten why.
Your humble descendant in the ideals of Freedom and Justice.
Garrett (written as I wake up in the Los Padres National Forest of California’s Central Coast area)
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