Dear Sharra, I've heard it said that you can live your life one of two ways: according to circumstances, or according to a vision. That is true not only of our personal lives but also of our life as a nation. We are so inundated by circumstances - many of them very challenging and stressful - that our vision becomes blurred. And that diminishes us. Forgetting the vision that gave birth to our country, we are weakened both as individuals and as a nation.
"Where there is no vision the people perish." (Proverbs 20:19)
Our greatest need is to get out of reaction mode, to reclaim our national vision and to begin again. Energy is generated when we remember who we are at our best and devote ourselves to reflecting it.
The Declaration of Independence is the embodiment of our national vision. It is America's mission statement, a set of principles which every generation needs to embrace or else those principles lose their vital force. They reveal why we exist as a nation. While the words themselves form our perfect ideal, we have never fully made it manifest of course — 41 of the 56 signers of the Declaration were slaveowners, after all. But it is the mission of every generation to "create a more perfect union," to further actualize our national ideal and to protect it from forces that would diminish or destroy it. The Declaration was radical in 1776 and it is radical today: the idea that all men are created equal, with the inalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The idea that governments are instituted to secure those rights, and if it's not doing its job then it's the right of the people to alter or abolish it. |
Today, we are embroiled in a struggle as great as that of any other generation, between those whose hearts are ablaze with the possibilities inherent in our national ideal, and those who for their own ideological and/or financial purposes have no intention of seeing it actualized. The Declaration of Independence is our guidepost for such times at this, for in the words of Abraham Lincoln, the Declaration is "a rebuke and a stumbling block to tyranny and oppression."
Other generations have turned back tyranny, and they have done so magnificently. From the abolitionists to the women suffragists to the original labor organizers to the civil rights movement, our ancestors have responded to the call to protect and preserve the ideals of the Declaration.
And now it is our turn. Today, that which would transgress against our national ideal is not a specific institution such as slavery or segregative on the suppression of women. It is an economic paradigm, a matrix of corporate powers — from insurance companies to Big Pharma to Big Food to Big Chem to gun manufacturers to Big Oil to Banks to the defense industry — whose goal of short term profit maximization now take precedence over the lives, liberties and pursuit of happiness of the majority of American citizens. The government whose job it is to secure our rights to life, liberty and happiness has become too often the great enabler of the forces that would diminish those rights. From the corporate capture of our government agencies to to the flood of dark money permitted by Citizens United Supreme Court decision, the corporatist mentality is threatening the basics of our democracy. It has turned us from a thriving democracy to a functioning oligarchy. It has allowed soulless economic values to take precedence over democratic and humanitarian ones.
Yet this reality is now so baked into the cake, that the system will not disrupt itself. It's time for the people to exercise our own rights. It's time for the people to step in. |
That is why I am running for President. I'm not addressing only circumstances, though on the Issues page at Marianne2024.com my specific, practical agenda is clear. The larger purpose of the campaign, however, is to reignite America's vision, to remind Americans of our larger purpose.
We are the inheritors of a tremendously important mission, and it is the task of our generation, no less than that of any other, to protect it and repair it a time of brokenness and peril.
To address the challenges of the 21st Century, we will need more than 20th century thinking. We must move from a transactional to a transformation kind of politics, addressing not only the symptoms but the root cause of our problems… not only our immediate needs, but also the larger philosophical forces at work in both creating them and solving them.
That is why I hope you will continue to support me with generosity and power. That is why we are taking it all the way, and it is why we are going to win. |
Thank you for your support, |
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