What Are the Most Important Things?

According to section one of the Fourteenth Amendment:
"All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.  No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of the law; nor deny any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

If you notice, the word "person" appears three times within the text.  That word is key as it caused much debate in the post-Civil War era.  What is a "person"?  Who is a "person"?  When you read that you tend to think of a "person" as someone like you - a living, breathing human with a job and/or hopes, dreams and goals.  Perhaps you have a family or a wife.  Maybe you have neither and are single.  If you do have a family, they are also "persons" and therefore are entitled to the same rights listed above.  What you may have not known is that corporations are "persons" as well.  They, like you, are entitled to the privileges and immunities that we - the citizens of the US - are.  This means that Walmart, Goldman Sachs, and Citigroup are, in the eyes of the Constitution, "persons" like you and me.  This is known as "corporate personhood".

This is a strange thing.  A corporation like Goldman Sachs (as one example) has access to teams of lawyers and, I'm assuming, much more money than most people reading (or writing) this.  They also have access to lobby groups, "super pacs" and government officials just because of the aforementioned money and legal professionals.  This means that, at the end of the day, corporations have many more rights and liberties than the average "person" here in the United States, and they have taken significant advantage of this.  They are now the most important "persons" in this country.  They control the media, due process of law, our electoral process, our system of government, and the food and drugs we put into our bodies.  Now, they also want to control our schools.

On February 27th, 2012 there was a shooting at Chardon High School in Ohio.  An assistant football coach and teacher named Frank Hall is credited with saving the lives of many students that day.  He chased the gunman out of the cafeteria and into the parking lot preventing further shootings.  He then went back into the school to comfort three young male students who had been shot as they lay dying on the floor.  Frank Hall stated recently: "We need to make a stand right now that our schools are the most important things we have in this country, not Wall Street, not Capitol Hill, our schools.  We need to determine that in our minds and heart that our school and our children need to be the most important thing we have.  That's the bottom line."

Sorry Goldman Sachs, but Frank Hall is correct.