World government is coming, one our children and grandchildren may well live in. The beginnings of it are already here. While a number of good citizens have created the blueprints and models for a variety of democratic governments for a united Planet Earth, unfortunately the dominant paradigm is the specter of Global Empire. Wake up, wake up, people! Let’s work together We People of Earth. It’s time for us to build our Democratic World Government for our Spaceship Earth.
Our choices are not between whether or not we reclaim our various national sovereignties versus establishing a world government. Our choice is what kind of world government do we allow? What manner of planetary regime do you help establish? Will it be world government by the people, of the people, for all people, or by self-selected masters over the rest of humanity? We the People of Earth, including you, have choices. We choose which way we turn.
Will our world government be one of freedom and democracy, or tyranny and dictatorship? Will it be one of openness and transparency, or one of secrecy and elitism? Will there be ongoing and increasing poverty and financial distress, or abundance of prosperity with equality of access to opportunity for all? Will it be a regime that focuses on the hard work of liberty or the illusion of security? Will this coming world government be one that plunders our common resources, accelerates climate change, and allows our environment to be destroyed or will it establish responsible stewardship for our planet?
I choose freedom and democracy. I choose liberty for all people and myself. I choose wealth over poverty. I stand for our economy to be rooted in environmental reality with ourselves in control of our own money. And I stand vehemently for an economic system that puts human beings before corporate profits. Put people before profits, and all of us profit as a rising tide lifts all boats and civilization advances. Put profits before people, however, and the corporations increase their power, the middle class is driven into poverty, capital flows into the hands of the relatively few families that compose the global financial elite, and social breakdown accelerates.
How about you? What do you choose? What do you stand for?
Furthermore, even as I stand for the right to self-defense, I stand for peace in a world without war. Although not a pacifist, my stand is that war is obsolete. War must be criminalized and policed just as we have outlawed human sacrifice, cannibalism, slavery, crimes of revenge, and incest among others. Those terrible crimes still occur, yes, but they are considered crimes and are addressed and dealt with as crimes.
Conflict can be resolved or at least managed without violence. There will never be true security, but as a unified planet we can have a degree of global security from the absence of war. That is freedom from war. I seek a global society based upon individual human rights and shared responsibilities. We must have a world where government and its institutions are transparent and not the secret manipulations of elitists behind closed doors. I stand for privacy, not secrecy. Justice is for all of us, and there is no justice without freedom. We can no longer live on a planet where some people are free and the rest of us work like slaves while pretending we’re free. I seek to live without fear in a prosperous and transparent democratic world government. I emerge to stand with others as We the People of Earth.
The essence of the designation “We the People of Earth” is rooted in the American Constitution. That magnificent document echoed around the world from one revolution to another as republican democracy and middle class capitalism took root in what became the United States of America and began to spread. Unfortunately that spread mutated and at times the U.S.A. trampled on its own Constitution, most recently with the Global War on Terror, the Patriot Act, the Military Commissions Act, and a slew of Executive Decrees. The latest horror is the National Defense Authorization Act.
Even so, those remarkable words crafted and agreed to by the Founding Fathers of America enshrined as the Constitution still have power and continue to inspire and empower those so moved by its message. The first paragraph states:
“We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”
It is not my intention or desire as a current citizen of the U.S.A. to advance any American triumphalism at the expense of the dignity of other countries. Instead I acknowledge and celebrate the influence of the U..S Constitution as a generous contribution not just to Americans but also to all humanity for the cause of democracy everywhere.
This process began with the Cyrus Cylinder of Ancient Persia from approximately 539 B.C. through the great experiments in Athenian democracy in Ancient Greece. It unfolds today through the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, the Earth Charter in 2000, and the 2007 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Democracy has been fleeting and intermittent in human history, most of which has been seared by imperial quests for domination, the lust for power, ethnic bloodshed, the oppression of women, and religious intolerance.
I love the land of my birth, but I have no desire to return to the past or stay in the present danger. It is my every desire to move forward with open mind, open heart, and strong spine to co-create the next evolutionary step with this Constitution as a vibrant model. I may be wrong, but I daresay many of the Founding Fathers, were they alive and together today would sense the urgency to take this next and necessary evolutionary step. Thus we move from “We the People of the United States” to include all the world’s people and transcend all national borders to take this next step together as “We the People of Earth.”
To do so we must reclaim our personal and individual sovereignty, give up our many and conflicting national sovereignties as obsolete, and embrace a new vision together of planetary sovereignty and the responsibilities such demands. The six specific items listed in that first paragraph of the American Constitution are exactly what we seek to manifest for all humanity on a planetary level. We want those six items for all people everywhere. People everywhere, from all cultures, naturally in their own different ways seek out such blessings. Yet such blessings are difficult to establish and even more so to protect, uphold, and cultivate.
We reach out to those who oppose us, for they too are among the people of Earth, and invite them to join us in intelligent mass collaboration to co-create a global constitutional democratic federal republic. Planet Earth itself may finally achieve the status of a political jurisdiction, and a transparent, democratic one in alignment with the brilliant diversity of its environment and biosphere. Our other choice is to continue the on-going march into perpetual warfare, roiling economic upheaval, never-ending energy crises, increasing environmental destruction, cross-border pandemics, and finally, global dictatorship with accompanying social breakdown into a world of famine, fear, pollution, and poverty.
The challenges before us are already upon us. Wars spiral out of control wherever we look. Wars of all kinds rage around Earth from gang wars to drug wars, from international wars to civil wars, from riots, insurgencies, and rebellions to revolutions and coups, from border wars to foreign invasions, from state terror to global terrorism to domestic violence, from ethnic strife to religious hatred, from one genocide to the next genocide. Global climate disruption is but one vast part of environmental challenges that are upon us. Industrial pollution of our air, soil, water, and food, toxic waste, desertification, overgrazing, overfishing, deforestation, and overpopulation all threaten us. Health issues including hunger, sanitation, nutrition, epidemics, and pandemics erode away at the foundations of humanity. Economic, financial, and energy issues overwhelm us with yet another level of collapse.
Obsolete political structures and economic markets undermine and divide us. Religions of the world preach peace and unity yet agitate people to roar with hatred, fear, and violence. Technology outruns our ethical capacity to control them, including stunning advances in robotics and artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, genetic engineering, neurotechnology, and the loss of local community control over these technologies. The power of national military forces, local rebel and terrorist groups, the various military-industrial-intelligence complexes, criminal cartels, politicalized religious institutions, transnational corporations, and the central banking system have to be reckoned with as their rivalries and power plays threaten us all.
Transparent, democratic, and constitutional world government is not only possible but also pragmatic. It is the next step in our cultural evolution as a species. And it is hard to turn a big ship around. Our current institutions have enormous inertia, yet without serious and fundamental change this inertia will carry us all off the cliff like a stampeding herd of bison.
We have the technology today, including the Internet, to facilitate local-global cooperation and planetary governance. We have the resources. Local, regional, and global institutions are already in place for us to use, reform, rebuild, and use as a foundation to build with during this transition. We need the will to do so. The average human being will be challenged to look beyond their local, tribal, regional, religious, and national allegiances to understand we are one species sharing one planet. All our local problems are now global. All our global problems are now local challenges.
The alternatives are increasing fragmentation and breakdown as global civilization collapses into a planet-wide Dark Age or dictatorship by the financial and socio-political elites in their attempt to prevent total collapse and seize total control. It may be dictatorship cloaked in all the trappings of democracy, and it will still be tyranny. We are rapidly approaching a tipping point in our history as a species if we haven’t already tipped. There is much to be done in all areas. And on the socio-political front that is working together to build democratic world government.
There are many models to work with. I have my preferences. My preferences, for example, include eventually establishing a United Federal Republic of Earth as a constitutional federation of tens of thousands of local regions with their representatives cooperating directly in a global parliament with a prime minister or world congress with a president, both with a supreme judiciary, that bypasses nation-states and allows for all ethnic groups to have a voice in planetary government. I also support the concept of local autonomous communities networked together around the world in an integrated planetary federation or global cooperative. And my preferences are not the point. The point is the time is now to wake up to what’s possible and work together in spite of all our differences. We can do it.
We must learn to forgive our enemies and forgive ourselves. We must remember love, dignity, respect, and honor are the ethical bonds that transcend the divisions of race, class, and religion. Compassion and kindness are contributions to world peace and global unity. Our work will be challenging. It demands patience, courage, open minds, open hearts, solid feet, and strong backs. Our challenges require vision, imagination, creativity, action, execution, and implementation. Together we can play to our various strengths and reach out across cultures to lead ourselves forward. Or be resigned to apathy, cynicism, fear, hate, and destruction. The choice is ours. The choice is yours.
NOTE 1: Modified excerpts from Chapter 1 from copyrighted manuscript of book in progress by the author advocating for people across Earth to work together to build Democratic World Government and prevent the establishment of Global Empire. We the People of Earth is trademarked ™.
William Dudley Bass
New Year’s Day 2009
Revised and Reposted 9 January 2012
Seattle, Washington
NOTE 2: This essay was originally published as “We the People of Earth: It’s time for us to build Democratic World Government,” on my older current affairs blog, At the Brink with William Dudley Bass on 1 January 2009 at, http://atthebrinkwithwilliamdudleybass.blogspot.com/2009/01/we-people-of-earth-its-time-for-us-to.html. This was revised and reposted here this January 2012. Thank you.
Copyright © 2009, 2012, 2016 by William Dudley Bass. All Rights Reserved until we Humans establish Wise Stewardship of and for our Earth and Solarian Commons. Thank you.
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