Opinion/Editorial
THE FIVE FREEDOMS OF THE 1ST AMENDMENT UNITED STATES CONSTITUTION
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
The five freedoms are:
1. Religion.
2. Speech.
3. The press.
4. The right to assemble peaceably.
5. The right to petition the government for redress of grievances.
That those ‘freedoms’ have been so violated by the current leadership of the country is beyond dispute, and these violations have been so totally apparent and displayed that they are hard for almost anyone to believe. The right to have a free media has been sacrosanct ever since the amendments were created, drawn up, and then signed into law, but the President, only a few days back, threw reporters from four well-known national organizations out of covering the White House because he determined that they were reporting ‘fake’ news.
You will note there is no evaluation in the 1st Amendment about what is real, fake, or otherwise. The press is to be free to choose by its very nature, and freedom of the press is, and has been, meant to mean exactly that. The freedom of speech is currently being abridged, as citizens and immigrants alike are being threatened with Department of Justice lawsuits or even deportation for saying things contrary to the beliefs of this current administration. The right of peaceful assembly is under attack, as the definition of peaceful all of a sudden becomes interpretive, just as the fake in supposed fake news.
The 14TH Amendment is also under attack: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” Only by a bare minority did this blatantly obvious Amendment to the U.S. Constitution survive intact with an attack by the current administration and then only bare-bones support from the United States Supreme Court.
The question that comes to mind, as these self-evident attacks on American liberties keep appearing, as if from nowhere, is: how can the nation stick to its mission of continuing to become the most honest governmental and cultural geographic and cultural center of the world if it cannot or will not follow the dictates of the finest national leadership document ever written, called the United States Constitution, and the Amendments that followed attached to it?
Or should time play out as the nation descends into a more authoritarian form, will the document and its followership decline in number and motivation to the point where the written ‘relic’ becomes that, an idyllic memoir of times gone by, as easily avoided as a structured form of social behavior as the New Testament of the Bible has become over time. Today, people, even those of solid-seeming Christian beliefs and exercises, read the New Testament assiduously and with great enthusiasm, but when it comes to implementing those things that Jesus Christ held dear and his apostles wrote about in that series of documents, that part of the Bible is set aside and retired until another time when it is picked up again.
What is in the future for the United States of America is anybody’s, and everybody’s, best guess. Will the country as a whole be able to weigh in and once more decide that the ‘common man,’ and woman in this country has a magnificent life compared to at least 175 of the remaining countries out there? Beggars, subjects of starvation, shoeless and unclothed children do not run on broken streets and walks or paths of mud and parasite-filled ground in the USA, although that is the course of events in half the world’s countries. Americans do not travel, for the most part, however. If traveling, they move aboard luxurious aircraft, stay in wondrous hotels with full heat and air conditioning, and then shop and eat at places where more than fifty percent of the world’s population are never allowed in, even if they had the money. The United States is currently at war with a country that has an average monthly wage of just over $250 a month, yet cannot seem to be able to do much with such a damaged infrastructure or economic engine the size of a model airplane, while facing the U.S., with an average monthly wage of $ 5600 and by far the largest economy on earth.
What are we, the people of this country, really doing with our country and to ourselves? The billionaires run wild with mean-spirited power, and they are covered in the New Testament too, and not with anything but distaste by the Lord. What are we, the people of this country, really doing with our country and with ourselves? Keep asking yourself that as you watch the news with disbelief, and maybe get up tomorrow and start to get involved.
