Reflections on Community Rights from Rural America is a monthly column by CR activist and organizer Curt Hubatch. Curt is an unschooling father of two young children and one young adult. Currently he works as a substitute rural letter carrier for the USPS. He lives in a cordwood house that he built with his wife, family, and friends in Northwestern Wisconsin.
As a father who wants his children to inherit a livable planet full of potential and possibility, this statement written by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence has great significance:
“He [the king] has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public Good.”
In today’s terms, the king’s priority wasn’t supporting the public good.
I read a statement recently by Tom Goldtooth who does care about the public good. He is executive director of the Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN) and has been fighting for a better world for Indian and nonindian people most of his life. Paraphrasing him he said, we are at war with the earth and need to keep the remaining oil in the ground.
Tom is an active, traditional Native American elder. When a guy like this talks, you sit up, pay attention, and listen… at least I do.
Like Tom Goldtooth (Listen to him HERE) I think most of us know at some level that we are at war with what gives us life. We’ve known we are at war….. since we were children. However, over time we’ve had it conditioned out of us, and business interests and bottom-line thinking have won the day.
I believe that the reality of our current environmental predicament – pick your poison: climate destabilization, human overpopulation, accelerated species extinction – has brought us to a second revolution in our country’s history. As hard as it is to imagine it is as equal to the first American Revolution, it is one that future generations, if there are any, will learn and talk about as we did about the first American Independence movement and Revolution.
The world has blown open the window to revolution. There is no reversing the irreversible. We as a species and nation can only adapt to an ever increasingly chaotic and collapsing world. We cannot go on thinking and acting like we have since the dawn of civilization and believing that it is the greatest and best way to live.
You might be wondering where my facts and stats are in this column. I’m not including any, because I’m speaking to the part of me and you that knows the truth. To the small part that doesn’t take a chance to speak its truth as to how we feel. Tragically we feel justifiably powerless in our public and private thoughts much of the time.
But is it true that we are powerless?
Let’s look at the Declaration of Independence and the first charge against The King of England. I’m suggesting we are very much in the same situation as the radicals and revolutionaries were prior to 1776. Our government and our crumbling institutions, like then the King of England, care little about the public good.
If we are ever going to come up with a resilient, regenerative, and sustainable system of government and economics, we will have to assert our Right to Local, Community Self-Government. Over 200 communities and counting have successfully done this in the United States. They have said that they have the right to enact and enforce laws that protect their health, safety, and welfare. And they, along with the ones that have failed to successfully pass an ordinance or charter stating this right, have faced immense pressure from, not The King of England, but from the state and federal levels of government of the greatest democracy on earth! A tragic example of this is Grant Township Pennsylvania. In theory in this democracy, The Sovereign, that’s us, have the same governing authority as the king once did. The state– maybe empire is a more fitting term– has used The Rule of Law to squash – sometimes successfully, sometimes not – citizen initiatives to fend off big corporate projects that run contrary to the community’s vision of economic and environmental sustainability.
Thankfully the revolutionaries and founders declared what they declared and made a document out of it. Governments, in their eyes, were to be instituted to protect yes, property, but also the health, safety, and welfare of We The People. And when our governing institutions fail to do so, well, there’s another statement in the Declaration that will not leave me alone:
“Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, —That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”
It’s time for the small part of us that knows the truth—we’ve been feeling powerless—to acknowledge that statement, be courageous, and fight to make it real in our lives. Acknowledge that we are at the beginning of a movement that is willing to do whatever it takes to fundamentally alter our form of government. Dusting off the Declaration of Independence and becoming better acquainted with this document can lead to it becoming powerful rather than anemic in our lives.
One thing we can do, at this stage of the game, is become more than one person. Stand with another in the places we live and start to take actionable steps like enacting and enforcing common sense laws like the revolutionaries that helped shape the Declaration of Independence, and like citizens are currently doing in the over 200 communities across the United States. Mandating what We The People want from below and not complying to a corporate minority’s dictates from above.
