Two weeks before 9/11 in 2001, my eldest son, John, after screwing around his first year of college enlisted in the Marine Corps. His enlistment wasn’t an act of patriotism or a desire to serve his country, it was simply a response to pressure from his father and the too few options he felt he had a available to him. Yet, when the media replayed, again and again, the images of the free fall collapse of the World Trade center towers and the pyroclastic dust clouds swallowing Manhattan, John was hooked and for the first time in his life was swept into the wave of superheated patriotism that emerged from the rubble.

John completed boot camp with a stripe on his shoulder, an expert rifleman pin on his lapel and miraculously even knew the names of the secretary of defense and the joint chiefs of staff and he left for war firmly believing in the American ideal that all people are entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. He left for war believing he was a warrior fighting for those who cannot fight for themselves, for you and for me and he was willing to die to protect us. Today, like many combat veterans of foreign wars, he wisely questions the official reason America invaded Iraq and like many of his friends he has rightly felt betrayed by his leaders yet that spark, that love of country, that willingness to protect and defend, even to die for an ideal that is greater than self still burns in his warrior’s heart.

Much more adamantly than my son, I too feel betrayed by my leaders. Recklessly acting on weak intelligence, or worse, handpicking intelligence to make a case for war, there lurking in an office on Pennsylvania Avenue a choice was made that my child was expendable, inconsequential and nothing more than a pawn in a grand undisclosed scheme of empire hatched by unnamed plutocrats. If Americans were truly independent, if Independence Day really represented freedom from oppression and “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights” then shareholder blood would be on the battlefield and quarterly margins reduced by the cost of war.

Americans are dependent upon foreign manufacturing, foreign oil, centralized power production and distribution, factory farming and food distribution to name but a few essential services. We are not an independent nation or a free people. Foreign interests may now invest in American politics through political action committees not for love of country or a sense of loyalty and patriotism but for profit. Politicians that accept money from these interests are not patriots, they are not putting their lives on the line to defend your interests or mine, they have no loyalty to country at all… they are bought and paid to make decisions not for the greater good but to improve the bottom line for foreign investors.

My boy didn’t risk his life, play chicken with vehicle born IEDs, collect his friends’ body parts, kill Iraqi citizens defending their own soil and condemn himself to a lifetime of recurring nightmares just to enable foreigners to plunder American resources and put Americans out of work. If a foreign army invaded these boundaries all of us would take up arms to defend our country. The foreign invaders are here, they aren’t using guns yet, instead of bullets they are using dollars but they are definitely here. As a patriot the best way to fight for independence and defend our country is to vote against candidates who accept those dollars at the national, state and local level.