“A Great Awakening!”

Some people have defined the great awakening as the time on Sunday when parishioners wake up from their minister’s sermons. I see it as a new movement sweeping across America where people are finally waking up and standing up to the corporate take over of American representative democracy. The recent move by various companies to withhold financial support from ALEC, which is the American Legislative Exchange Council, is a sign of this great awakening in America.

The American people are tired of the politics of eminent confiscation where corporations buy off politicians and craft political legislation and policies that subtract rights and resources from average Americans. Finally, people are realizing the perils of such activities and their adverse impact on the entire country. When jobs are shipped overseas, Americans have no money to buy products or pay state, local or federal taxes. When taxes cannot be paid to local municipalities, services provided by those entities either wane or cease entirely. All America suffers and it begins with the corporate mindset that sometimes places greed over human need or outsources jobs overseas just to keep up with corporate competitors.

Furthermore, the recent attempts at voter suppression and union busting are stark examples of policies emanating from ALEC, and the politicization of Supreme Court justices may be further evidence of how corporate power has compromised or affected the judicial judgment of some persons sitting on the nation’s highest court.

The recent decisions by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Coca Cola, McDonald’s, Wendy’s; Intuit, Kraft, and Pepsi to withdraw financial support from ALEC are also steps in the right direction. It is my belief that corporations can still achieve their financial purposes without stealing away our democracy and crushing asunder the needs of average citizens. The truth is that we all lose when American democracy works only for the privileged few. Both Corporations and individual citizens lose when the engines of prosperity that have historically blessed all Americans falter and fail to keep moving all America ahead at full throttle.

Without oversimplifying here, perhaps we are finally witnessing an awakening of corporate conscience, which are signs of deeper moral awakenings elicited by our saturation in the current culture of greed and our continued cloying by perversions of justice emblematic of American power politics on the national and state levels.

The average citizen knows when things are not right, when he or she has been displaced and mistreated, when a system that has been originally designed for his benefit is constantly rigged in favor of those who already rule.

ALEC is another example of an organization that desires to abbreviate the rights, advantages and opportunities of average, everyday folks through prefabricated legislation that gives corporations everything while leaving average citizens virtually with nothing.

The time has come for a moral reawakening in America when corporations realize that although they now have  extended their global reach by assuming multinational status, they must not forsake the mother country that gave them their first chances at success. It would be sad and terrible thing if we continued our current course and did not awaken from this slumber of apathy and avarice that is splintering apart our beloved country.

Thank God there are signs of a new awakening in America where people of conscience are finally saying enough of putting our own people on the bottom tier of the ladder. Enough of this” politics of abandonment” where we put everybody else first and keep putting Americans last. Enough of this quest to take the present and future away from our children and grandchildren! Enough of this “winner take everthing that we have and everything that we are ever going to have,” politics.

My prayer is that this new great awakening will not be short lived but will continue until a more prosperous, generous  benevolent and compassionate America can finally be realized for all the people of this great and beloved land.