This Beautiful Word: Unalienable

...not subject to being taken away from or given away by the possessor...

“We hold these truths to be self-evident,

that all men are created equal,

that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,

that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

– Preamble to the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America

The Declaration of Independence

No matter how many decades of my life have been spent in one European country or another, and no matter how happy I am to identify as a citizen of the world and a member, above all, of the human race, I will always, also, be an American. After all, one of my ancestors, Oliver Wolcott, became the Governor of Connecticut, signed the Declaration of Independence, and as far as I have researched was a caring and decent human being.

Though I carry with me the shame of all the injustices, unjust wars, secret coups, and other crimes against humanity that US politicians have ordered, I also carry the pride for all our brave voices raised against those corrupt powers, and for all our efforts to steer the US onto the path laid out in our Declaration of Independence: promising to uphold the “unalienable right” of all people to “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Though I have lived in Spain for years now, my spirit, right now, is there.

After the devastating passage five days ago, on July 3, of Trump’s 900-page “Big Beautiful Bill” that shifts almost all the funds for helping people to giving more tax breaks to the billionaires, building new prisons and hiring 40,000 new ICE agents to fill them, smashing the Declaration of Independence’s definition of America’s purpose, I found some solace in returning to that document and feeling the power and high frequency of its words.

Amongst all its powerful words, the word, “unalienable,” felt like a shudder in my heart, like the key that unlocks all the rest, the magic word that grants your wish, a holy rock emitting light rays and frequencies that can light up the whole world. It is not a word used in everyday speech, and to my ears it has always seemed stiff, a lawyer’s word, not a word of the people. But suddenly it shone like a diamond under the rubble of our democracy, destroyed (temporarily!) by Trump’s 900-page bomb of right-busting words.

I knew what unalienable – an alternate spelling of inalienable – meant, but when I looked up its definition and synonyms, my heart swelled with gratitude and relief, and I felt the uplift of renewed faith in humanity. This terrible bill that had just passed, slashing so many rights in the US, and leading the country straight into dictatorship, had bombed our Ship of State, and the whole country was now in danger of drowning, like the US was the Titanic. The word “unalienable” roared like the sound of helicopter blades overhead, flying in to save us by reminding us that our rights cannot be taken from us, because they are unalienable.

The icy waters we had been thrown into was the Sea of Forgetting. What we need in order to save ourselves is to remember. When the list of synonyms for unalienable appeared before my eyes, I almost jumped out of my seat, for they made up a fleet of other rescuing choppers flying in formation, each one with its word painted on its side: unchallengeable, absolute, sacrosanct, inviolable, non-negotiable, untransferable, inherent, indefeasible.

As I read the definitions of each of those words, each one added its weight to the argument that human rights are inherent qualities of being human, like heat and light are qualities of fire, not objects that can be taken away, stolen or broken. We cannot be separated from them. Case closed.

I felt solid ground beneath my feet again, the sureness that we would not drown in the Sea of Forgetting. Especially when I read the last word, indefeasible, and saw its meaning: “not capable of being annulled or voided or undone.” Precisely what is being attempted at this very minute!

In the longer perspective, we are aware that the US tragically did not live up to its noble founding words by including all of humanity in the phrase, “All men are created equal.” The blinding greed and racist mentality of the European invasion of the continent that drove the mass murder of the rightful, native inhabitants of the continent in order to take over their land, that created an economy based on 200 years of brutal slavery, still persists in many other forms of institutionalized racism and sexism. But there has always been movement toward the goal of making those words proclaiming the universal right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” a reality: the Women’s Movement, the New Deal – creating Unemployment Benefits, Social Security, etc. – the Labor Movement, Civil Rights Movement, Peace Movement, Gay Rights movement, Black Lives Matter, etc., all of which have gotten us closer to making those words live up to their promise. As the great Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. said in his sermon in 1968, in Washington, D.C., four days before his assassination:

Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

This is a good time for us to remember how much power words truly have. In the mouth of a hateful person, they can destroy. But when they come from a place of hope for humanity, they can also save, and even bring the spirit of the dead back to life, like the dream that seems to have died, that a country could be founded on the belief that “All men are created equal.” These five words – not proclaiming that all have equal abilities, but rather that every human life is equally sacred – had never been proclaimed on Earth before 1776, as most countries were ruled by kings. It shook people awake, out of their hypnosis that there will always be kings who rule, and peasants who have no choice but to obey. It was an Earth-changing statement, a new thought, that in this brand new country, there would never be a king, it would always be a government of the people. This, strangely enough, is what this horrific bill takes us all the way back to: the power to declare we shall not be ruled by a king. Square one!

What force it is that shapes our destiny remains a universal mystery, which to me feels like the pivot point, the essence of this moment. The ancient Greeks attributed whatever happens to the moods of the Gods on Mt. Olympus. Throughout the world, other beliefs attribute destiny to karma accumulated in past lives, the power of the planets, our relationship to God by whatever name you call the Source, to the pantheon of lesser gods embodied by the natural elements, or to no powers at all, just pure, meaningless, random luck.

But there has been a thought revolution, an awakening to a broader view, going on in the US and many other countries. People are opening up and talking about the nature of all that exists being essentially vibrational, (every atom, after all, is composed only of energy – vibration – and space, with nothing “solid” in sight). Since we are always sending out vibrations through our words, thoughts and feelings, tuned to the frequencies of our intentions, fears and dreams, it no longer seems unrealistic to imagine our thoughts being able to harmonize with other vibrations, and contribute to the shaping of our destinies. We are in, quite literally, the moment of metamorphosis, when the imaginal cells of the butterfly, sending out their light signals, connect to others and create a higher manifestation of itself, unlocks its hidden potential that had been waiting all along, in the body of the caterpillar that is now disintegrating in its isolation.

I am quite certain that this under-the-radar revolution of expanded awareness will give us new powers to rise above the destruction. We ourselves, as we exercise our newly unfurled wings of expression will rescue ourselves and each other from the icy waters of forgetting our inalienable rights! We are the helicopters coming to save us.

In the words of Eleanor Roosevelt, who chaired the Human Rights Commission of the United Nations, and helped write the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:

Eleanor Roosevelt Photo: Library of Congress

“The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.”

On July 4th – the day after this bill passed like a wrecking ball demolishing the Bill of Rights – social media was flooded with words that shone like torches lighting up a dark night, and reassured me that we, the people, are ready to do what we have done before in this country to protect the rights we have, that our own government wants us to forget: we will speak up, sing out, and stand together to lift a unified voice ringing out across the land, until the truth of those words corrects the wrongs and restores the rights that false leadership think it can get the people to forget. As Pete Seeger’s historical song, “If I Had a Hammer,” written in 1949 in support of the Progressive movement, later a major song in the Civil Rights Movement of the 60s, and sung here by The Soul Stirrers, proclaims…

“If I had a hammer, I’d hammer in the morning, I’d hammer in the evening, all over this land. I’d hammer out danger, I’d hammer out a warning, I’d hammer out love between my brothers and my sisters, all over this land.”

I grew up going to Pete Seeger concerts during the Civil Rights movement, and when he got us all singing, it felt like we had the power not only to raise the roof, but raise the torch of liberty and justice back into the hand of the Statue of Liberty, from where it had fallen. We all have a hammer, a bell, and a song to sing. We just need to use them, ring them, and sing them.

Here are a few of the day-after posts that caught my eye, words that radiate the frequency of truth for all humanity, helping us remember our inalienable rights, and our power to shape our destiny.

“This, my dear, is the greatest challenge to being alive: to witness the injustice of our world and not let it consume our light.” – Thich Nhat Hanh

Thich Nhat Hanh

“Be brave. Keep speaking up. We must use our freedom of speech now more than ever, to defend from their threats against it.” – Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez photo: Corey Torpie

“Optimism is a strategy for making a better future. Because unless you believe that the future can be better, you are unlikely to step up and take responsibility for making it so.”

– Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky

“Disobedience, in the eyes of any one who has read history, is man's original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.” – Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde

“If wars can be started by lies, peace can be started by truth.” – Julian Assange

Julian Assange