Good evening Vermonters,
Veterans Day is the one day our nation sets aside to honor every American who served; no exceptions, no exclusions, no partisan score-settling.
Today’s VTGOP post that singled out a Vermont legislator and told her she was not included in “Happy Veterans Day” violated the spirit of this solemn holiday. November 11 belongs to every veteran, living or fallen, regardless of how any elected official voted six months ago.
Politicizing Veterans Day dishonors the sacrifice of those who fought under the same flag for the same country. It turns a day of unity into one of division.
Thank you to ALL who served. That is what Veterans Day demands. Nothing more, nothing less.
Respectfully,
Sgt. Kenneth Sekuterski, Jr., USAF (Ret.)
To the Editor:
I have been a big advocate for decentralized power, which would allow diversity of opinion, practices, and so on, providing greater freedom as people could live with diverse policies. However, after the Civil War America’s “one nation” ruins such choice, and replaces freedom with force, obligating everyone to follow the dictates of the center, controlled by the most powerful party backed by the national majority; in other words, the tyranny of mob rule that replaces choice and diversity with conformity and coercion.
The early American colonies, and later the states, were to a much larger extent what Thomas Aquinas labeled “united wholes.” They had similar religion, culture, and thus politics. Each state was made up of largely coherent blocs of like-minded people.
Today, Texas has a population of over 31 million people. The entire population of the states when they ratified the Constitution was less than 3 million. It did not reach Texas’ current population of 31 million until the Civil War! If we had told the people at the time of the ratification of the Constitution, or the Civil War, that 31 million people would be forced to live under the same state government, they would lock us up in an insane asylum. You cannot manage that many people under one state government, let alone our entire country under one federal government.
I recently met with conservative and libertarians in Texas, yet the county they were in, and many near them in Houston, were very radically progressive. States that we label “conservative” have, in fact, very liberal counties within them. Why force these separate counties to be at war within the state to decide policy?
So, what can we do? We must abolish the “states” as we know them and hand governance over to local county control. Every decision, and all authority that was previously held at the state and county level, would now rest solely at the county level. This would also rid us of a layer of bureaucracy, politicians, and taxation. Now we would have only the local county-level control and the federal.
Next, we would slowly transfer various decisions still done at the federal level and give those choices back to the counties, thus decentralizing power and authority back to the people at the local level, allowing us to decide our own government and laws at a reasonable scale to create a unified whole, where people can select the policies of their choice.
We could create thousands of self-governing counties of like-minded people. One county might be conservative, the next liberal, the next communist, the next libertarian, and so on. Each county would maintain sovereignty within its sphere, create its own policy, and enact it. People could move to the county of their choice and live under the laws of their choosing. This would remove much of the antagonism, hatred, and more derived from majority democratically-elected rule, and end that great evil of centralized control and forced conformity, that places all citizens politically at war with each other; all while achieving the level of self-government that the Founders desired.
-Jeb Smith