The book America, that the Daily Show under Jon Stewart put together had asterisks and footnotes. Because there are lots of times throughout US history that they say everyone should have something, life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, free speech, and so on, but, by everyone they meant like rich white dudes, or dudes with property, not the people who had been declared property of course. Growing up and living in DC it becomes clear a little more easily the asterisks.
Our local laws are regularly challenged by Congressional folks for funsies. We have been repeatedly denied access to Congressional representation, and yet, still required to pay federal taxes, a particular thing that is true nowhere else in the US.
People try to attack our city because of those nationally elected folks, and yet they go home, and all the various surveillance set up to track them, tracks us.
But it just means more work to be done. Just looking at Supreme Court precedents alone, we have had many terrible ones. There are ones I consider terrible still in place. And others that were later changed. It's sometimes exhausting to daunting to discover things, rights, even back on the to do list, when they seemed done.
But well, history books show us that terrible decisions can get fixed. They just kind of skate over all the work. It's a lot of work. But the good news is there are a lot of us.
