byChrisWhite – 2014

Our American republic groans beneath the abundance of its own blessings. A people so saturated with liberties they no longer recognize them as precious. Rights like heirlooms left in drawers. Forgotten, smudged, and unexamined. The old parchment dream scrawled by dead men in wool and wig, now pixelated, diluted, weaponized, reduced to memes and slogans and the occasional tattoo above a clavicle. Freedom, scrawled in gothic letters, but rarely understood.

We eat well from the table of privilege. Even when we complain of hunger, we speak with full mouths. We complain with free voices. And that, in itself, is a kind of miracle.

We love to travel. To obscure places. I know that elsewhere, the curtains do not part. Not even a slit. In rooms where men govern behind silence, secrets bloom like mold beneath damp stone. Italy, China, Spain, Germany, Serbia, Croatia, France, Russia and thirty-five or six other countries. Old kingdoms with new names.

The soil so soaked in centuries of power that corruption has become a crop in rotation. Not that we stand immune. America has its own rot. More polished, perhaps. Well-dressed and eloquent. Corruption in a tailored suit, smiling through teeth veneered by campaign dollars.

But we have something. A sliver of daylight. A thing carved into law like a crack in the granite wall of power. The Freedom of Information Act. A small key, rusted, redacted and clumsy, but a key nonetheless. It permits the citizen to knock, to ask, to pry loose the corner of the rug beneath which truth has been swept. It does not promise answers. Only the right to ask. And in the asking, a reminder that government, however monolithic, remains answerable to those who feed it.

Still, questions are only useful if someone bothers to hear the answers.

The eye of the nation now twitches in twenty-four-hour fits. No longer a single gaze but a thousand fractured lenses, each one trained on its own spectacle. Journalism, once the cathedral of the republic, has become carnival. A cacophony of barkers and jesters. Truth costumed in bias for profit. Opinions masquerading as gospel. Every man his own prophet, his own publisher.

We used to have three channels. Now we have infinity. The consequence of too many mirrors is that we no longer see each other. Only ourselves, endlessly reflected. The algorithm has taught us to listen only to what agrees with us. Disagreement has become offense. Nuance, heresy. The left taxes and builds its citadels, the right sharpens its spears, and in the center, the common ground has become a trench.

I remember when politics meant compromise. A win meant both parties bled just a little. Now it means total conquest. If you don’t agree with the right half, you’re a fucking dumbass. If you don’t agree with the left half, you’re a deplorable. 

They say outrage drives clicks. Anger monetized. Fury with a sponsor. And so every headline howls. Every anchor leans. The news is no longer an attempt to reveal the world, but to bend it. We choose the version of reality that flatters us best. We drink from poisoned wells and call it water.

Edward Snowden. A name. A fissure in the myth of our moral infallibility. A man who cracked the seal. Revealed the eyes behind the mirrors. The wiretaps. The surveillance. The unseen net cast across our digital lives. Some called him traitor. Others called him savior. And maybe he was both. Maybe we all are. Our loyalties tangled like old string.

But here lies the cruelest truth: revelation is not revolution. We saw what he showed us. We shrugged. We scrolled. We returned to our lives. The world does not change because truth is revealed. It changes only when truth is believed. And belief, these days, is for sale.

The Freedom of Information Act gives you the right to know. But knowing isn’t enough. The truth must matter. And I’m not sure it does.

Once, we trusted the press to filter the noise. To separate the gold from the dross. Now, we drown in data, and still thirst for understanding. We have journalists who tell the truth, but their voices are drowned in the static of a million feeds. We have others who trade in deceit, and they are amplified because deceit is louder, more profitable.

Truth, it seems, is not what it once was.

But the bones of democracy remain. Beneath the sediment of slogans and the rot of propaganda, the old architecture still stands. Columns cracked, roof sagging, but intact. We still hold elections. We still cast votes. We still believe, dimly, in the idea of a republic not owned but shared.

And what then shall we do? How shall we mend this battered vessel?

Start with term limits. End the empire of incumbents. Let no man become throne. Let power pass, as breath between lungs. Let there be a rhythm to our governance, a pulse not frozen in place.

Then, address the media. Not to censor, but to clarify. Create space for truth, not just noise. Incentivize verification. Celebrate complexity. Demand curiosity. Let journalism return to its ancient purpose: to witness.

And we, the people. Let us learn again the art of listening. Let us speak not to conquer but to understand. Let us abandon the need to win. There is no prize for defeating your neighbor. There is only silence, and regret.

Democracy is not a sport. There are no trophies. Only the slow work of self-governance. The long, arduous labor of coexistence. It was never meant to be easy. It was meant to be just.

The founders did not promise paradise. They promised possibility. They handed us tools. They warned us to use them well.

We have failed, at times. We will fail again. But failure is not the end. It is the cost of attempting the impossible: a nation of equals.

Let us try again.

Let us rise not in anger, but in resolve.

Let us earn our freedoms anew.

And may the next generation find us not divided and bitter, but humbled and awake.

Watching.

Asking.

Building.