That the politicians and other office-bearers of the world’s most powerful country, the United States, and the most vaunted constitution sit impotently watching President Donald Trump and his cohorts destroy both, is chilling. It belies all the security and solace the trustees of the great institutions and edifices of the nation have provided the majority of its citizens who have taken them hitherto at face value.
Now, even if only briefly — until it is likely snuffed out by state power, just as Afro-American George Floyd’s breath was by the police in Minneapolis — it is the ordinary people who have emerged as the true leaders and upholders of values, ideas and institutions that need not be enshrined in historic documents such as the constitution nor reside in towering, awe-inspiring governmental monuments and apparatuses to attain an iota of legitimacy.
Fundamental ideas and ideals of humanity — universal fairness, justice, liberty, equality — need not be inscribed in fancy verbiage on historic parchments in the halls of government. They are more permanently etched and inscribed in the hearts and minds and souls of all human beings who, for that reason, rise in unison against any abrogation of those immutable ideas and aspirations. For them, the rococo writings on parched palimpsests in the Halls of Congress and other co-equal nodes of governance matter less than the greater truth in graffiti spray-painted on a wall, shining bright, as the sun itself, in this otherwise benighted country: No justice, no peace.
ZEND LAKDAVALA
Las Vegas, USA
zocrateszend@yahoo.com