Democracy or Plutocracy (rule by the rich)???

Two score and ten years ago, a rich, white, male president, John F. Kennedy, was assonated.  Seven score and ten years ago, a poor, white, male president, Abraham Lincoln, gave his Gettysburg Address.  Neither president understood the nature and necessity of justice for the nation.  In 1776, a rich, white, male elite drafted the Declaration of Independence; in 1787, a rich, white, male elite drafted the US Constitution.

These documents are treasured by Americans, but I place the Pledge of Allegiance above the Declaration and the Constitution.  Why?  The Declaration and Constitution do refer to the concepts of freedom and equality, but they omit the equally important and absolutely necessary concept of justice.  The Pledge ends with this fundamental requirement of democracy -- "With liberty and justice for all."
"With liberty and justice for all" happens to be Billy Graham's definition of the kingdom of God.

Without justice for all its citizens, freedom and equality ring hollow.  For example:

• Without justice, slavery can be abolished and legal freedom gained; but they were quickly followed by a new birth of oppression --- legal segregation.
• Without justice, legal segregation can be abolished and legal freedom regained; but these victories were quickly followed by an exploding racial wealth gap and the mass incarceration of young Black an dHispanic males.
• Without justice, the beautiful and eloquent phrase "a government of the people, by the people, and for the people," becomes, in tragic reality, "a government created by a rich, white, male elite for a rich, white, male elite."

Justice demands that we look underneath the oppressive systems of slavery, segregation, wealth gap and mass incarceration to find the underlying causes/values and uproot them---something neither Lincoln nor Kennedy did.  As a nation, we must confess and repent from our national sins of American exceptionalism, white supremacy, WASPness (White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant), and the American trinity of hyper individualism, hypermaterialism and hyperethnocentrism---something the nation has never done.

Without a public statement of confession and repentance, we repeat the same national sins, slightly revised, over and over again.  The Declaration and the Constitution did not lead us from repentance to justice.  Neither does the Pledge, but at least the Pledge, for the first time in American history, publicly tied freedom and justice together.

We need to add another sentence or two to our Pledge:  "We pledge, under God, in a spirit of repentance and restitution, to free all our oppressed people.  We will pursue, under God, Jubilee justice for all our citizens."

Slave-holding capitalists wrote the Declaration and the Constitution; a socialist wrote the pledge.