This weekend we celebrate our nation’s independence from imperial rule, freedom, and democracy. This year we look back on 229 solid years of independence, and, despite some ominous symptoms, still exercise our basic freedom in vigorous arguments about freedom – what it is comprised of, which freedoms may be abridged , by whom and for what reasons. Because we generally agree that freedom is a necessary condition for democracy, we take freedom seriously.

But what about democracy? We take for granted that we have the best democracy in the world, and hardly ever examine how we actually do it. Consider these examples:

A few years ago the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) proposed permitting oil and gas drilling under a large drinking-water reservoir in NE Ohio. At the public hearing a citizen asked why the BLM would even consider the risk of contaminating the drinking water for 100,000 people. The BLM representative replied: "We take that risk because Congress says it our job".

The citizen was outraged: "You aren’t taking the risk," he said angrily, "We are."

Around the same time Tim Hagan, then a Cuyahoga County Commissioner, made an eloquent plea at the Cleveland City Club for government help for the poor, the sick, and especially children. But a question about government mismanagement made him mad: "I can’t understand," he said, "how people can talk about the government as if it were something totally outside themselves, for which they had no responsibility or obligation. If our government isn’t doing the right things, we have to make it so that it does; we are the government, and we make it what it is. ..."

More recently, President Bush, asked to describe his presidency, replied: "... it is a decision-making job; I make a lot of decisions ...." He also said "I'm a war president. I make decisions ... in foreign-policy matters with war on my mind. ... And the American people need to know they got a president who sees the world the way it is."

This week, in anticipation of Independence Day, our President gave a speech about Iraq (referring five times to 9/11 and liberally sprinkled with the words "terror" and "terrorists") in which he asserted "There is only one course of action against them: to defeat them abroad before they attack us at home. ... Amid all this violence, I know Americans ask the question: Is the sacrifice worth it?" He then considerately relieved us of the need to think for ourselves and answered for us: "It is worth it, and it is vital to the future security of our country."

He called on us to ‘stay the course’ of armed suppression that not only hasn’t worked to end terrorism it has terrorized and slaughtered Iraqis and made their nation the world center of terrorism.

How did we get in this fix, in a supposedly democratic nation, with our President making decisions for us, setting our priorities, spending our money, making choices for our children and elderly, risking our kids’ lives in a war against a fiction, and spending our nation’s wealth on a mission we didn’t agree to?

We are belatedly asking ourselves: what about freedom? what about democracy? We didn’t fight the War for Independence for security. We sought independence so we could be free, so we could make choices and decisions for ourselves and govern ourselves in democracy.

We are also asking "Would I risk going – or sending a son or daughter – to war in Iraq for an armed but ephemeral ‘security’ from terrorists?"

And if we are not willing to take that risk, what choices do we now have? Author Robert Parry says we have only two: " ... continue to send [our] young soldiers into the Iraqi death trap and hope for the best, or build a movement for impeaching George W. Bush – and then try to make the best of a bad situation in Iraq." (http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0629-27.htm)

Neither choice looks good. And hell, someone once remarked, is a place with no good choices. Bush has brought us to this place, using "one-sided and incorrect material" in his decisions; we have had no "unity of understanding" and no "true centrality of purpose." Our freedoms have been curtailed and our democracy has withered; even our independence has been degraded into security, as we engaged in the barbarity of a needless, endless war.

Probably the ‘least worst’ choice open to us now is impeachment. As long as we have a President who make decisions for us and risks not only our soldier’s lives but democracy itself, we won’t be able to fix Iraq. We must first set our own house in order. Democracy gives us the tools to do it, if we are willing to use them.

Impeachment will be hard. Making the best of the bad situations in our own country and what’s left of Iraq will be truly difficult, and creating new, good choices will require enormous work

– work that can only be done by We, the People.

* Chairman Mao.

This column will appear in the Kent-Ravenna Record Courier on Sunday July 3, 2005

Caroline Arnold (csarnold@neo.rr.com) served 12 years on the staff of Senator John Glenn and is now active with the Portage Democratic Coalition and Kent Environmental Council http://www.kentenvironment.org.

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