An Open Letter to the People of The United States

The following was posted on Hunter/Gatherers's blog, the dignity of struggle. Thanks to Gaia for the heads-up.


An Open Letter to the People of The United States

I wrote this letter this afternoon. Please take time to not only read it, but to spread it. Share the link with friends. Paste the entirety of the text on internet blogs and message boards. And if you are willing, download the image file and either hand it out, or wheat paste it on street corners. Thank you.


Thomas Jefferson once warned that:

“We must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our election between economy and liberty or profusion and servitude. If we run into such debt, as that we must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessaries and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements, for our calling and our creeds...[we will] have no time to think, no means of calling our miss-managers to account but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow-sufferers... And this is the tendency of all human governments. A departure from principle in one instance becomes a precedent for[ another]... till the bulk of society is reduced to be mere automatons of misery... And the fore-horse of this frightful team is public debt. Taxation follows that, and in its train wretchedness and oppression.”

We have fallen short in our duty as citizens to keep the republic created for us two hundred and twenty years to go. Of course, many years and many players went into the transition from Constitutional Republic to Socialist Democracy. It was not a swift blow that destroyed our assembly of free states, but millions of pin pricks that became sword thrusts, all predicated upon a misunderstanding of our Constitution; from both ignorance and mal intention.

Our country was NOT to be a FEDERAL HIERARCHY with endless laws enforced by brutal hands growing out of a central capital, but an association of FREE STATES, bound by the principles and protections of liberty, where self determination could flourish and free minds could decide where and how best to achieve their destiny.

Our country was NOT to be a NATIONAL SECURITY STATE, entangled in foreign alliances, perpetually at war, forcing the will of our most wealthy on the peoples of the world. Instead we were to encourage trade, commerce, and the cordial relations they require with all nations, thus providing prosperity and safety to our citizens.

Our country was NOT to be a WELFARE STATE, oppressed financially and morally by entitlement, shackled by the politics associated with redistributing the wealth of the public, where Corporations and Lobbyists find advantage in courting our representatives and subverting the will of free peoples and markets. Instead we should be an open land, where individuals and companies who work hard and promote ingenuity succeed, and those who rely on risk or deception suffer the consequences of their choices.

Our country was NOT to be a POLICE STATE, where citizens are all suspects monitored by cameras, where dissent is met with a baton, or where speech petitioning the redress of grievances is met by a cage and a fine. The United States should be a model to the world, of a nation where all ideas are welcome, and the best among them, supported by reason and sense, rise to the top, while those based on ignorance or hatred fall into the gutter of silence.

EMPIRE was NOT in the design of these United States, and nor were its costs:

A populace propagandized to live in fear of the outside world, taxed in every labor to afford the machines of death with which to further subjugate humanity.

A populace falsely led to fear one and other, taxed in every purchase and exchange to afford bureaucracies, ever expanding in their cost and confusion, whose promises - juvenile in their utopian design - could never be realized.

A populace so inundated with a fascist worship of THE STATE, that the overwhelming majority lose the desire to inspect its motives, to examine its methods, or to call it to question for its crimes.



The two largest POLITICAL PARTIES are in lockstep closing the window of debate to what they decide are acceptable norms, and in preventing any competition in the marketplace of political discourse. Thus voting has lost almost all of its strength, and the mind of the American Citizenry has be reduced in its power to what amounts to the mere selection of color when choosing representation.

We must begin to talk passionately about these issues. We must begin to strike the root of tyranny as it grows in our land. We must speak truth to power using the words John Steinbeck wrote in The Grapes of Wrath, that the likes of Paine and Jefferson were not causes, but results.

We must demonstrate the RESULTS of our government’s lust for power and privelage. We must demonstrate the RESULTS of our government’s unethical collusions with industry. We must re-assert the intended American Order of INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS over the will of the state.


For, if out of laziness or fear, we do not rise to answer the call of the age, to take our place in modern history, then we will have nothing to say when the shadow of fascism rests on every corner of our land, except that we invited it.