Misadministration

[H2O Man]

4. Great questions.

Now, I could be wrong, but I suspect you are hinting that we need to study Malcolm X along with the Constitution. That seems to be a pattern when you respond to my essays. Am I right?

Malcolm taught that if people are to act differently, they must first think differently. For if people limit their thinking to what it already has been when they suffer defeats, they will continue to suffer and be defeated.

If people study the Constitution -- including that Bill of Rights you always talk about -- they will find it defines avenues for citizens to take to try to make positive change. In the past, most Americans have taken the Constitution for granted. We do not have that luxury today. Just as the Founding Fathers were thinking outside the box that old King George and the British economic powers that be attempted to keep them in, we need to do so today.

Let's just take Amendment 1. How many Democrats would you think have exercised their Amendment 1 rights in the years since 2016? How many members of this forum? How often have they contacted their representatives? Local, state, and/or federal? Including the ones that were once republicans, but have transformed into maga cult members? How many have participated in a group action to pressure their elected representatives?

Now, there are times when I at least attempt to think outside of the box. An example that you may recall: somewhere around a decade ago, when the issue of fracking was being contested, one of my NYS senators refused to meet with anyone from the environmental community. That didn't seem right to me, considering Amendment 1. It just didn't sit right with me. One evening, when I was about to speak at a church in a city in this region, I had a surprise. I saw frames of old newspaper articles from the late 1950s. You know this story, of course, but at my age, I tend to repeat myself.

Those articles were about a young minister named Martin Luther King, Jr, who gave a speech at the church from exasctly where I would soon be standing. I thought about that almost the whole night. I decided if that senator refused to meet with me, I'd go on a hunger strike. He ignored me, of course. But as time went on, and even the NY Times contacted me, this became more difficult for him to do. School students were writing to him, saying that from their social studies classes' lesson, they thought he was wrong to refuse to talk to me. And that was reported in the news. Finally, after I spoke to an audience of 1,200 at the state capital, the guy met with me.