An Open Letter to the American People

Posted by: Abel Collins

This writing is an excerpt from a novel that I am working on at the moment. I’d like to encourage you to share any reflections you might have. I could use the dialectic in my book:

Curious days. We assemble in a country and a nation: This shelter, a political society created to harbor free people; built with democratic architecture. We live in this structure, liberty guaranteed, and yet we are not free. We refuse democratic responsibilities, the sacrifices of self-government. Despite the best of intentions, we, the people, submit to the status quo, status infinitum, where wealth defines us. Despite our parroted words of freedom and equality, we are like the rest, divided into groups that can be boiled down into Masters, their henchmen, and slaves. We live in a democratic house, but we are not a democratic society. In the attic are dusty boxes filled with tarnished ideals. There was a spirit, a revolution, here once. There was an idea that we could govern ourselves justly and make a more perfect union. The emergence of these ideas is again at hand. We can no longer defer to the culture of greed that we have allowed to guide us to ruin. It is a new age for old questions. What is freedom, how shall we exercise it, what are our intentions, are we leaving this world better than we found it…?
We must find the answers to these questions together. We, the people.