Celebrate Independence

What would our Founders think of our times and our troubles?

They successfully rebelled against the world's greatest colonial power, defeating the British king, for the first time in world history. They replaced a foreign monarch with a written Constitution, providing "a republic, if you can keep it," as Ben Franklin said in Philadelphia in 1787.

Politics left slavery unresolved. We fought a great civil war, with 700,000 killed. We amended our Constitution, banning slavery and discrimination, eventually giving everyone over eighteen the right to vote, banning poll taxes.

We let presidential power grow, still fettered by Courts and Congress checks and balances.

Now we're engaged in a grating uncivil war for the hearts and minds of our country. Greed misrules our Nation, from the White House, where a Russian-friendly real estate developer presides as President, to Tallahassee, to City Halls and the County Administration Building, where real estate developers likewise misrule. Lying has become routine.

In 1983, I got documents declassified and was invited to testify about massive secret Oak Ridge, Tennessee pollution, by federal nuclear weapons plants, which would have made our Founders sick at heart. The subcommittee chair, then-Rep. Al Gore, Jr., wrote "Earth in the Balance" in 1992, predicting the consequences of fiddling while the world burns, e.g., too much carbon. (I bought the book during my first visit to St. Augustine that year).

Our Founders gave us the tools and owner's manual to our new Nation. Congress is empowered to fund, legislate and investigate. So are our state legislators and County Commissioners. They must no longer flinch from fulfilling their functions.

Be not afraid of power-hungry bullies, whose rodomontade reveals their empty unethical bumptiousness.

Exhibit A: Barking mewling histrionic hissy-fits from President Donald John Trump and St. Johns County Sheriff David Bernard Shoar, who legally changed his name from "Hoar" in 1994.

Beholden to others, a small group of willful meanies, like Trump and Shoar, are tyrants, unjust stewards. Have no doubt of what our Founders would do about them. They wrote it down. Our parents and teachers passed on their wisdom.

On Independence Day 2019, we fondly remember our Founders and all who came after them, believing all are created equal.

Believe in yourself. Stand up for your rights and for the rights of your family and our community. We are all in this together.

Read the Mueller report. Discuss it. Russians are busily
working, dividing Americans, creating illusory "issues" like Confederate monuments and memorials. (Check out Mueller report footnotes 70 & 85, accompanying text and note redactions re: related ongoing investigations).

Do your homework. Go to meetings. Speak out. If you see something, say something.

30+ local communities in St. Johns County are stuck with flooding and bad drainage, the result of developers building in wetlands, permitted by broken local governments.

We must alter or abolish governments that don't work. Charter reform is required.

Government needs more checks and balances, not less.

Usurping Caesars like Trump and Shoar are so unAmerican. Such unconstitutional oligarchs should be removed from office, as provided in our federal and state constitutions.

We need a temporary moratorium on new developments here in God's country, St. Johns County, while we cope with flooding, sprawl, roads and schools.

Enough one-party misrule.

How about a County Charter, allowing us to elect our County Attorney, and to place an independent Inspector General overseeing maladministration in all local government offices, including Sheriff? Why not an Ombuds to help people? Enough smug, ugly mediocrity and mendacity in government.

I've been working for change in our local governments since 2005. We've seen dozens of victories.

It is up to us -- "a republic, if you can keep it." Government is not a spectator sport.