The above quotation comes from President Kennedy's address to the Newspaper Publishers Association in April 1961. Somehow, in the ensuing years, this nation has forgotten that its purpose is to be a nation of, for, and by the people, which thereby signifies that the people have the inherent right to know what their governance is actually doing on their behalf. Indeed, the people need to know the actuality of what is so happening, so that they can thereby debate the merits or demerits of such. Instead, we live within a construct, of which, never have there been more secrets, more opaqueness, and more deceit by our government, than we so see today, and because of this, the people for the most part, not only do not have the full information that they need to ascertain and to make an informed opinion about this, but they are for the most part, being deliberately left out of the equation, and considered therefore to be an irrelevancy.
No nation can progress as a free and independent republic, when the very people that such a government is supposed to serve, are not forthcoming to that public. To believe, somehow, that those who are in authority know better than we, the people, is to discount the value of the people, and to thereby take away their democratic voice, and in conjunction with that, to vacate the very unalienable rights which are theirs, in perpetuity.
In today’s America, we would be hard-pressed to have any President address their dismay at the secrets being kept from that society, but this seems to be the standard practice of the day, enabled further, by a compliant mainstream press, which does not desire to engage the administration by probing questions of import, but rather seems to serve, often, as an echo chamber, for the administration.
When the public is consistently left in the dark, about those matters of most importance, then those who are its citizens are not really citizens, at all, but rather are better defined as subjects, who are meant to keep their noses to the grindstone, and basically to obey what those that are the pinnacles of power, tell them that they must do. Further, the people of America, seem to be in an unenviable position, in which they should trust that their government is acting on their behalf, without having actionable information to verify such or to even examine its merits.
The people are the conscience of the nation, and deserve to have their voice, for those who are our representatives in this governance, are supposed to serve the general public, for the general welfare of that public, but whenever the people are precluded from really knowing what is going on, this then becomes a situation in which the government that we believe that stands for certain valued principles, has been overtaken by an overly secretive counterfeit government, which has no Constitutional legitimacy. To have a free and open society necessitates that the people are cognizant and vividly aware of what their government is up to, by that government being not only transparent to the people but also by that government, recognizing that its true validity can only occur when a well-informed public has its say.