Guest Blog: Divine Strake and the Rebirth of Democracy

This guest post was submitted by Andrew Kishner of Kanab, UT. Mr. Kishner is a member of the Stop Divine Strake Coalition and founder of www.StopDivineStrake.com.  In June, he co-organized a rally in Kanab, Utah, against the Divine Strake test.

In a 2,000-mile stretch of uninterrupted red-statehood from Indiana to Nevada, ordinary folks who had never attended a rally, or spoke out against an elected leader, or submitted an opinion to their newspaper editor got fed up. It was the unexpected protest of average people demanding that a defense agency and its unelected public servants adhere to the same natural laws that protect citizens from those who negligently or wilfully threaten health or life. The citizens' protests alone forced the intelligence and planning arm of the military to scrap plans to test out a dirty bomb in a radioactive field of death in Nevada, and later the fragile ecosystem, and a more densely populated area, in Southern Indiana.

Although the citizens' chorus of protests was aroused by the fear of a huge dust cloud of toxic substances from Divine Strake, the words they spoke were not new. They were the words from a verse that we all learned in our youth.

It was in elementary school, when we pledged - en masse - our commitment to two radical concepts in front of Old Glory, that the seed of the democratic model that each of us carries through life was planted. In that pledge, we vowed to uphold liberty and justice, two glorious resources of our nation. Those hallmarks of our democracy, however, are not the patented concepts of our founding fathers, nor the registered trademarks of our Congressmen. They are the people-given - some would say God-given - gifts to all Americans, past, present and future.

It may be decades or generations before a community will rise up to fulfill the pledge to democracy. When that time comes, when what is best for the people takes a back seat to misconduct, greed or power mongering, ordinary men and women must educate their fellow citizens, exercise their common freedoms, and, if necessary, indict or impeach those persons and agencies that contravene the institutions that safeguard our democracy and our collective health and well-being.

In Owen Wister's "The Virginian," Judge Henry eloquently and brilliantly asserts this morality: "The courts, or rather the juries, into whose hands we have put the law, are not dealing the law. They are withered hands, or rather they are imitation hands made for show, with no life in them, no grip. And so when your ordinary citizen sees this, and sees that he has placed justice in a dead hand, he must take justice back into his own hands where it was once at the beginning of all things."

We must never forget that the delegated powers in our democracy are, have and always will be ours to give, and to take back. When our elected or unelected leaders fail to fulfil their pledge to serve us and protect our health, our safety, our rights, our laws and our nation, then it is the people who, in the end, will exercise their absolute power to restore the institutions of democracy.   

As New Mexicans prepare to protest the Divine Strake test that is now threatening their state, we must all continue opposition to this test with the firm confidence that our protests - in the name of protecting health, peace, and justice - are not a defiance of democracy but rather an assertion of it.  Judge Henry called it the "fundamental assertion of self-governing men, upon whom our whole social fabric is based."

Guest blog by by Andrew Kishner of Kanab, UT. If you'd like to submit an article for possible publication on DFNM as a guest blog, please contact me by clicking on the Email Me link at the upper left-hand corner of the main blog page.