American Grassroots...Dead?

Man has incorporated and taken advantage of so many things in His mere 6,000 years of existence; thus, He cannot fathom a world without such things. But what keeps this sort of conformity alive? It is none other than the commonality of a set of misconceptions punctuated by one theme: the status quo is stable and any slight change will force the entire universe into chaos.

However, as unveiled by history, the truth could not be further from this mutilated and biased "theory." During the better part of American History, Slavery had existed as a government-run Institution. It was a "crucial" part of the status quo, but was it, as in the status quo, stable? As per the slave-owners and masters, sure. Dubbing the Institution a "necessary evil," these men - of course, women could not own slaves for a time - were unable to even imagine a "better life" - earning fortunes with minimal toil. Why should they have bothered to change the status quo? They had not incentive as there was no "good government to show its wrath against the Evils of Society" - they were the government. Such a "wrath" would be useless. Thus, anti-slavery sentiment had to come from elsewhere -  and it did.

Abolished in the late 1860s via the 14th amendment, slavery was arguably the first Institution lobbied through Grassroots Organizations and Means. Harriet Tubman's Underground Railroad - run by Tubman and a group of ex-slaves - was started and maintained by "volunteers." Many other groups, such as Fredrick Douglass's newspapers - "The North Star" and "New National Era" - helped contribute to the destruction of the "necessary evil." But the abolitionist Grassroots movement culminated in Harriet Beecher Stowe's one-and-only "Uncle Tom's Cabin," which according to President Abraham Lincoln "made this great war," the war that sought to rid the Free World of Slavery.

Now, understand we must take this story with a grain of salt. It is not war that is the main essence of the Grassroots Movement, but influencing a government that would otherwise show apathy. Had Abraham Lincoln not won the Presidency, the Southern States would not have seceded and Slavery would still have remained. Moreover, there will always be that one side that seeks  to defend a primitive institution, which harms others, by sheer power and largess as well as by using the past as a means of justification. But, we must understand that just because a policy or even an institution, as big as Slavery had been, has had continued longevity does not mean that society is stable. Stability is relative and an organ of point of view, playing the tune of the oppressed and destroyed.

As the grassroots-based Abolishment movement - which influenced a previously apathetic government - shows us, it is imminent for a grassroots-based anti-war movement to bring about drastic, yet necessary change as War is quite very similar, in relation to society, to what Slavery had been to it 150 years ago. After all, it is the job of Democracies, according to Madison's Federalist #10, not to merely reflect the opinion of  the Majority, but to mediate the opinions of opposing minorities or factions. Thus, we mustn't be pestered by the greed-ridden defenses of these War-mongering power hoarders; rather, we must "rise and rise again until Lambs become lions."