Commentary: Making Declarations for Our Independence

On July 5, I joined two other fellow members at First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis to take a passage from the Declaration of Independence and provide our own commentary from contemporary life. Here is my portion of that talk in written form, followed by a video version.

We the People

Prior to listing grievances against a tyrannical king, the Declaration of Independence points out that government derives its powers from “the consent of the governed.”

If government is destructive, the Declaration declares: “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 affect their Safety and Happiness.”

So… as we the people of this country … we can withhold our consent. Government today is destructive, as we easily see with ICE agents in our cities. If we decide a new foundation, with principles and re-organized powers that improve our safety and happiness, is our right to establish — what might that look like?

I will borrow a few ideas from some of the people I have featured recently at the Minnesota Women’s Press website. [Unfortunately, we can no longer afford to print 10,000 free copies — including the stash I normally brought here to First Unitarian Society — but this is some of what is online and in the print magazine we sent to supporting, opt-in members this week.

 

Amie Stager, for example, is a labor writer who provided a commentary for our “250 Years” topic this month. She wrote:

“Increasingly we see evidence of the CEOs, tech lords, and billionaires who profit off the work done by people who struggle to pay for food, fuel, and a safe space for family to live — whose freedom is that? Jobs are threatened by artificial algorithms. Ongoing payments for insurance deny us coverage to a dwindling access to health centers — whose freedom is that? Young adults are sinking under a mountain of debt from post-secondary training and degrees. Our air and water are filled with toxins from consolidated farms and incinerators — whose freedom is that?

She continued: “Yes, this is a depressing picture of ongoing exploitation and extraction that has always shaped our country. Yet, as we know, Minnesotans also show what true freedom might actually be: life-giving connections and networks, especially visible in the grip of crisis impacting our neighbors and us. A world where we don’t have to fight to live is at the tips of our fingers. We shouldn’t have to fight for it, but we do, and we must.”

One basic principle Amie suggested: Change our policy about how we tax the wealthy. As she wrote: “If the wealthiest 1 percent paid taxes consistently the way the rest of us do and paid workers livable wages, we wouldn’t need government safety nets or philanthropic mutual aid. We could feed and house and care for everyone who labors for those profits.”

The Guardian news pointed out that there are 32 billionaires who owe their wealth to low-wage corporations, including eight from Walmart and three from DoorDash. Starbucks has the largest gap in pay, with a CEO compensated $95.8 million while his company’s employees average $14,674. Consumers, as well as the governed, can withhold their consent.

Another suggestion Amie pointed out is a narrative change we can all be part of: “The propaganda many people seem to have bought into is that it is the lower classes — not the upper classes — who are leaving us hungry. Too many of our neighbors seem to be ignoring the fraud perpetrated at the highest levels.”

Emphatic Values Required

 

Stacey Abrams photo by Sarah Whiting

Stacey Abrams of Georgia was in town recently to talk at a Women Winning event. She said another important step for all of us is to engage the 90 million Americans who skipped the election in 2024. “They’re not apathetic; they’re despondent, because they live in communities that never change.”

We know the solutions people have pointed out that would be impactful in the long run. For example, in 1963, President Kennedy’s Presidential Commission on the Status of Women, chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt, released a report recommending national paid maternity leave, greater access to education, and support for childcare. That was more than 60 years ago. And to that list I would add the work by advocates over decades to better address housing affordability and gender-based violence. Such little movement needs unified public pressure that we can more emphatically give our consent to.

Our founding Humanist minister John Dietrich recognized 100 years ago, from the growing field of psychology, that putting people into jail without rehabilitation efforts does nothing lasting to deter crime. I met recently with a group of young people in Loring Park who are involved in restorative justice to divert people at the front end of trouble before they get more entrenched in the wrong activities. We could proactively ask for that more emphatically, too.

I have learned from a few people lately about all the far-right, anti-immigrant rhetoric that happens globally. One of them, Sophia Binet of France, reminded people at the recent national AFL-CIO convention in Minneapolis that saying what we are against is not enough. “We have to offer strong alternatives to win hearts and minds, otherwise it is empty values.”

She encapsulated the sentiment of many labor organizers: “While they are trying to turn the clock back, we are moving towards solidarity.”

I met wonderful rural women organizing around candidates and issues at an event in the woods of Aitkin County. I will be writing soon about their frustrations about some rural women candidates not getting endorsement dollars from the DFL, which is concerned that women candidates still cannot win in Greater Minnesota. So, these women are unifying around their own mutual aid support — dubbed the “People’s Potluck Party.”

As we talk about regularly at First Unitarian Society — there is a lot for humans to do, and part of our purpose is to simply keep doing it. I published an essay recently by Joan Redwing that included this nugget:

“The remarkable thing about the United States is not that our institutions are perfect. It is that generation after generation we continue debating how to make them better. Democracy has always been an unfinished project.”

I’ll close this compilation of perspectives about a few ways we could more emphatically declare together what to rebuild by slightly adapting a quote from George Orwell’s novel 1984:

“In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance. …. [There is deliberate policy] to keep even the favored groups somewhere near the brink of hardship, because a general state of scarcity increases the importance of small privileges and thus magnifies the distinction between one group and another. War is … waged by each ruling group against its own subjects … to keep the [scarcity] structure of society intact.”

The consent of the governed works best in unity, with values clearly and loudly stated, to create a democracy that lives up to the potential our founders envisioned 250 years ago.

Toward this end, on a more personal front, the good news is that I have begun the transition of Minnesota Women’s Press ownership to a consumer-owned media co-op. We will continue online to showcase people power voices, supported by Minnesotans rather than simply by a dwindling supply of advertisers.

It is people power that can reshape governments and impact corporate management — and the role of Minnesota Women’s Press will continue to be to amplify the power of those voices.

Video Version

See the video version here — including preceding comments by a fellow First Unitarian Society member about his journey through civil rights history in several southern states, and following comments related to the Fred Haass book “The Bill of Obligations: The Ten Habits of Good Citizens.”