We all must stand up and fight for the federal employees who have spent their lives serving the American people in all manner of ways including helping people in need. Much of the important work they do is invisible to most of us as we go about our daily lives.
One of the most essential roles of some agencies and their people is to protect citizens from the powerful and unscrupulous by enforcing laws, rules, and regulations that were written to provide specific protections, from environmental, employment, standards for producers of food and medicines, all sorts of abuses from the financial and investment providers and the list goes on. These agencies and the protection they provide were not established just for the fun of regulating. All were prompted by abuses that occurred and were deemed to merit regulation.
One of the problems, as noted above, is that these things are happening out of public view, not because they are secret but rather because it takes an effort to stay informed about such regulations–an effort that few of us want to make. Thus these activities become ready targets for conspiracy theories and the whole idea of a deep state.
Like so many other things in life, the people who accuse others are often the very people who could be expected to be untrustworthy. Why would any of us think, for example, that such a dark thing as a “deep state” would exist unless it was something we would consider creating ourselves. This is not a new idea and even Shakespeare wrote about it Hamlet, “the lady doth protest too much, me thinks.”
I submit to you that a “deep state” is exactly what our new president and his cronies envision.
Most if not all of these laws, rules, and regulations will stand in the way of the new administration’s agenda. It is convenient that the enormous reductions in the federal workforce can be disguised as a cost-cutting strategy, thus obscuring the truer motivation. What better way to eliminate that which threatens to impede the doers of dark deeds.
We are witnessing the terrorist-like pillage of the careers of dedicated public servants who take great pride in serving their country and the agencies that do the daily work of government.
Do we understand the logic and intent of such thoughtless action? These citizens are not the legislators or policy makers who determine how our tax dollars are invested and where. They are soldiers who are too hard at work to even think about plotting fraud and corruption. All of the activities these public servants police were either determined to be necessary by Congress or a sitting POTUS in reaction to harm that was done. It is a monumental example of blaming the messenger.
We seem to have forgotten that the U.S. Constitution is just an idea that must be acted upon. Without the institutions and the people on whom the responsibility for its daily execution relies, our constitution is a fragile concept created “to form a more perfect union.” Without our vigilance it is an idea that, easily, could disintegrate into the archives of history.
With the last election we have placed our futures into the hands of people who have always put their own interests above the interests of the rest of us. In their eyes, the American people exist to serve them.
The consequence of entrusting them with such power goes beyond the adverse economic impact such action will create. It is the willful destruction of a “government of the people, by the people, and for the people” that has served us for so long, to make way for “a government of some of the people, by some of the people, and for only some of the people.”
We have entrusted them, also, with the power to choose who will be among the privileged few able to influence policy. Are the rest of us willing to endure a twenty-first century version of serfdom?
Our punishment for granting so much power to so few is having to witness the remarkable disassembly of the government that has existed to protect us from the “abuses and usurpations” of the very kind that the people whom we have just empowered, would employ.
The question that every citizen must ask is “are we going to sit by and let this happen, or do we admit our lapse in judgement and accept responsibility for doing whatever it takes to restore democracy, imperfect though it may be?” Our democracy teeters on the precipice of an historical collapse.
If we are successful in this restoration, our work will still be far from over. We must re-dedicate ourselves to the principle that “all men are created equal” because, absent this, no true democracy can exist. We must pick up Abraham Lincoln’s challenge from another time of crisis, so eloquently stated in the Gettysburg Address, to complete the “unfinished work” and a bring about a “new birth of freedom.”