What we have forgotten

This was written during a debate on rising poverty in the United States:

We have forgotten the struggles of our ancestors. The problem the United States of America is facing is one of an emerging aristocracy and a growing bourgeois class that exists to serve their needs. This is a problem since the amount of wealth required to even aspire to the Aristocratic level means that for every new economic elite there must be at least a diametric, and probably exponential, increase in poverty. The result is that we now have a ruling class. How many of us have gone to cast our votes only to sigh and choose the lesser of two evils? Even as we debate here the war in Iraq is being fought over western rights to oil, yet we pay ever increasing annual prices for gasoline and heating oil. We acquiesce when our leaders demand loss of life in the name of national interests; yet, all along we know that we are not serving ourselves but rather struggle to maintain the financially perverted desires of the aristocratic ruling class. But at what expense? The deaths of innocent men, women, and children classified as "acceptable collateral damage"? And as if this atrocity were not bad enough, there is even more loss. When we agree to such decisions are we are losing our moral and legal purpose - we are losing our very nation, the beacon of freedom for all peoples. We have lost a shared purpose and are prodded into action by trumped up national myths and icons.

Regardless of your social inclinations, whether they be left or right of center, we must always define that center as our Constitution and the creed that inspired it: The Declaration of Independence. This is our shared purpose. This is our reason for being. Sadly, we have forgotten this reason. We have forgotten why this country was formed. We have forgotten why we suffered through and reconciled after a Civil War. We have forgotten why so many brave families sacrificed their sons in both World Wars. And we have forgotten why we must remain undivided today. We, the free people of the United States of America, have but one purpose in history and on earth and that is to stand against the tyranny of a baseless and self-serving elite. This was the purpose behind our foundation. This is the challenge we have been given by our founders, the challenge they so bravely took upon themselves, and if we allow this emerging aristocracy to bend our will to theirs then we have failed ourselves, our ancestors, and the world.