On July 4, 2026, America will celebrate the 250th anniversary of its Declaration of Independence. That declaration states, in part, that all men are created equal and that they were endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights; among these being life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

We’ve been struggling, very largely unsuccessfully, with that mandate ever since.

In the context of its Black population, for instance, even some of the signers of the Declaration were slaveholders with no intentions of changing their own lifestyles by freeing them. Arguments between succeeding generations of slaveholders and Northern abolitionists became uglier over the next 85 years, and, as we painfully know, we fought a Civil War that killed in the neighborhood of 750,000 young Americans.

It was also the prime cause of the assassination of perhaps our greatest president. For about 12 years, from 1865 until 1877, a period known as our Reconstruction Era, a number of national laws were adopted that were intended to correct many inequities in our culture. The 13th Constitutional Amendment, for instance, prohibited slavery almost entirely. The 14th Amendment granted full citizenship to all native- born and naturalized Americans as well as assuring them of due process and equal protection under established laws. The 15th Amendment provided full voting rights for all male citizens and enjoined all States from abridging these rights on the basis of race, color, or previous servitude.

Most regrettably, however, between 1875 and 1894 a combination of Supreme Court rulings and Congressional enactments repealed most of the enforcement provisions of these laws. The result of those relaxations gave rise to an explosion of Southern laws and practices, referred to broadly as Jim Crow rules and regulations. These restraints segregated Black people from whites in schools, public accommodations, and economic opportunities. Those inequalities prevailed as legally unchallenged hardships for more than half a century.

Finally, the Congress passed the Civil Rights Act in 1964 under enormous pressures from a civil rights movement that had gained political clout from the leadership of a number of Black citizens, especially from Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

The Civil Rights Act banned segregation in education, employment, and voting rights. The last of these was reinforced in 1965 with the passage of the Voting Rights Act, which banned racial discrimination in election processes in every state by ruling against things like literacy tests, language proficiency, or skin color standards. In the meantime, starting in the mid-1800’s, the issue of women’s rights had been pursued by several female activists like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and a female suffrage amendment was first considered by the Congress in 1878. Unbelievably enough, It took a full four decades for the 19th Amendment to get ratified.

Two kinds of inequalities

With all of that history, then, where have we arrived in terms of people equality in the 21st Century? Sociologists advise us that despite considerable legal restraints, our practices and our culture are rife with two pervasive kinds of inequalities; the structural racist sort and the more foundational systemic category.

The former is rooted in many historical injustices, like segregation and broad discrimination in a variety of forms. It is manifest in any number of ways. For instance, the quality of available educational opportunities is impacted in many communities by biased taxation policies that assess white-owned properties at higher rates than Black or recent immigrant sites. This results in more funds being allocated to the former school districts than the latter. This, in turn, means better facilities and better teaching.

Another source of inequalities is vested in health care systems that are based fundamentally on abilities to pay. Less affluent members of our society can and do have less access to top notch care than their more monied peers. Statistics have demonstrated that there are serious national financial implications of socially differentiated health care.

It is estimated that nationally we lose about $175 billion annually from our potential GDP because of shortened working life spans.   Systemic racism is rooted in our belief systems and various inappropriate ideologies. We notice it when we observe talk and initiatives such as the white Christian nationalism cult, which totally ignores the reality that America is a nation of immigrants and hypocritically talks about their commitment to core Christian values while violating them in their demeaning behavior.

We also suffer from ethnic and racial stereotyping which is displayed in everyday biased activities like law enforcement where minorities are much too often treated more harshly than others for similar conduct.

Addressing these cultural inequalities effectively will require vastly different leadership than what we have elected to national, state, and local offices recently.

Our current national government is continuously installing divisive measures that tear at the foundations of our United States. It is startling to see masked ICE troops, President Trump’s private police force, roaming the streets, homes and offices of America and forcibly detaining people without grounds or due legal process.

These outrages mirror the same sort of atrocities carried out by Mussolini’s Italian Blackshirts and Hitler’s German Brownshirts in the 1930’s. But then, when you have someone behaving like a narcissistic megalomaniac in charge of our government, one who openly admires the style of dictators, why should we be surprised?  

Astonishing levels of inequality

Economically, we have astonishing  levels of inequality between the compensation of policy-level office holders and their employees. Recent analysis has revealed that on average, CEOs are compensated 285 times the pay of their workforces. In some extreme cases, typically reflecting the discriminations applied to racial minorities and immigrants, the multipliers are above 600.

Companies such as Starbucks have been glaring examples of that kind of inequality, but such dubious distinctions are clearly shared by many other organizations in areas like household services and healthcare. Responsible analyses of relative real values added by the respective levels of employment would surely demonstrate the unfairness of these gaps.

In a different category, although some positive improvement has been realized very recently, women across the nation are still being paid an average of 17% less than their male counterparts for similar responsibilities at work. In the tax and legislative area, something referred to as a “Big Beautiful Bill” by its Republican sponsors was passed into law by Congress under severe pressure from the White House. This measure, besides adding close to $4 trillion dollars to what is now an unsustainable national debt, severely cut back funding for Medicaid, effectively blocking access to prime medical support for huge numbers of America’s low-income cohort. It also provided major tax breaks for the wealthiest less than 1% of our country while raising the cost of living for most of the rest of us, as the impacts of the current outrageous and internationally divisive tariff/tax instruments kick in.

Voter apathy let this happen

So how did this inequality calamity come about? How has America developed more children and seniors living in poverty than any other nation in the developed world?

That is a complicated question, but widespread disaffection with government, which is shared by every age group of our current and recent electorate, is a significant part of the answer. Additionally, the 50% or so of eligible voters, who even bother to exercise their voting franchise, typically re-elect about 90% of incumbent Congressional officeholders without meaningful concern for their performances in office.

This pervasive lack of accountability has allowed a self-privileged political class to settle into the instruments of national governance. Based on their recent fear of being primaried, Republicans doing the servile work of bowing to Trump’s specious whims have given us all the evidence we need to conclude that keeping their jobs is their dominant motivation; public interests be damned.

Name-calling, retributive investigations and indictments, pay-for-play transactions, ignorance and disregard for laws and precedents dominate the current legislative and executive scenes. Crackpot theories, contempt for proven science, astonishing levels of corruption, and implementing the democracy-debilitating Project 2025 doctrine’s provisions have left no intent or room for dealing with climate change, gun violence, or other existential issues.

As this was being written, millions of unhappy Americans assembled across all of America to express their dismay and anger toward our current government in “No Kings” protests. That is a strong message for our government to get back to working on what is best for our people. It is an important way to keep pressure on Congress and the Administration. regrettably, however, real positive change can only be affected at the ballot box.

The hour is already late for developing a game-changing number of truly honest and conflict-ready candidates for national office in 2026 mid-term elections. The Democrats, to borrow a phrase from David Corn’s Mother Jones newsletter, need to quit bringing policy papers to a gunfight.

Serious but peaceful activism for the people’s benefit needs to be stimulated among ALL OF THE ELECTORATE in every local precinct, neighborhood, town, city and state. Our schools, societies and professional associations can add important muscle to the arguments for full and truthful expressions of our history as well as for the honest and reasonably regulated conduct of our diverse businesses. Our churches of every denomination can address the entire issue of inequality, especially where ugly immorality is so often present.

Nothing less than our fundamental freedoms are at stake. 

Charles M. Ericson lives in the Unionville section of Farmington.