Over the course of the Bush presidency, we have opposed the cult like loyalty that steals and squanders American treasure and further removes liberty from the average citizen - all in the name of safety. We have, to a fault, been blaming Bush and his cronies for our ills and the misdirection that allowed such to occur. We have also laid plenty of blame on Congress and the members of each party for allowing our current condition to arise in the first place.

Where we have failed, is by not blaming the average American. At the end of the day, it is the cumulative will of the American people that will change the course of human events that destroy our rights and the environment in which we live. We allow emotional attachment to religious doctrine and dogma, and the ever present clergy, to affect our decisions and distort our rationale as we are too lazy to realize that we must work in a present day reality to maintain our wealth and freedom that we wish to pass to our children. We are too afraid to stand and be counted as red or blue herdsmen goad us on with threats to our safety - with hordes of brown people waiting to follow our troops home or otherwise create another large scale tragedy the likes of 9/11. If one only took the time to realize that we are limited in how much we can deter such an attack and that there is a possibility it could happen again - and that it is how most of the rest of the world lives - we must surely realize that our military and hawkish allies can really do little to protect a free society from such events.

The constant rubbish being delivered to us daily from both parties needs to be scrutinized and ignored when absurd. There are examples in our history where the very same methods of governing and the tactics of those who have or want power use, that are instructive. They are instructive in that they always failed.

In the history of South Carolina, peer pressure and threats to safety and individual freedom were used to motivate a significant majority of white people to secede from the union by a small, elite majority that controlled the administrative and legislative branches of government and also controlled how members were nominated and elected. The small, elite minority utilized religious fervor and painted outsiders as atheist, communist and lovers of miscegenation in order to keep their subjects fearful enough to send their men folk to certain slaughter. The ultra conservative Republican control broke down and created it's own demise as it lead an entire region into a no-win, bloody conflict.

A Democratic majority developed after the Civil War and the mishandled Reconstruction that gave the illusion of wanting to address the ills of the common man, yet it was only a ruse to preoccupy the masses as the former elite re-established their minority hold on power and denied civil rights to those emancipated using legislative means.

The end of the old, elite, so-called Democrat regime's power came at the hands of a "progressive movement", that on the surface touted amending child labor laws and bringing health care to the average worker. Yet, "there was a negative side to progressive reform. Working-class whites, struggling to maintain some control over their lives, disliked being patronized by middle-class "do-gooders". It made little difference what the issue was: innoculations, medical examinations, child labor or compulsory education. The operatives, [mill workers] heirs to a long tradition of Republican independence, did not want anyone telling them what they could and could not do. They were especially offended by initiatives that had the state making what had customarily been families' decisions. Progressives meant well, but all too often they were callously insensitive to the feelings of those whose lives they were determined to improve." [1- South Carolina, A History, Edgar, USC, 1998 p472]

In 1927, in indirect or direct reaction to the progressive movements, the new Governor Richards' administration sought to have the world proclaim that SC was the leader in "righteousness". Suppressing liquor, gambling, fining couples for kissing in public and other such Puritanical offenses. A Saluda, SC judge declared that swimming pools were "tools of the devil" and that the recent boll weevil and drought plagues were "divine retribution" for swimming pools being in the state. State fundamentalist leaders and evangelists were in the vanguard of efforts to protect traditional values - attacking curricula in high schools and colleges, including the teaching of evolution, as "Biblically unsound". [ibid, p. 484]

If you take away the specific examples and look at the tactics, is this not what we see today? Does anyone remember the religious zealots who proclaimed that New Orleans suffered God's wrath for their sinful ways? The history of SC and how their illiterate, uneducated and isolated populace were manipulated is a microcosm of our present day society.

Populations that are illiterate, or lazy, or both are subject to a repeated misuse at the hands of the educated elite and the evangelical hangers on who appeal to those of Faith. The elite use the power of religion to tout "traditional" or "family values" in order to create conservatism and fear - in order to maintain the status-quo of the wealthy. The elite do not practice any traditional values as they hire women, court young pages and put cigars in the vaginas of female interns. But, they do use the hope and Faith of millions who find it much easier to follow their Faith without thinking than investing time in the true nature of things.

The elite will also not hesitate to remind us of the words of our noble and god-like founding Fathers whose wisdom and tribulations brought us into being. While some of the more astute founding fathers were Deists and/or Masons, it is instructive to look over the words they spoke, and the words of others who prevailed, that you won't be reminded of if you wait for someone else to remind you of such things.

"Great abuses in government, like great rivers, arise from small beginnings. They are easily checked at first, but encreasing imperceptibly in their progress, they at length become too powerful for opposition. Thus corruption crept into the British government; and thus your liberties will be gradually undermined, unless you speedily apply a remedy to the dangerous malady under which our constitution labours." - Appius [Robert Goodloe Harper] to the Citizens of South Carolina

"When the people find that they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic." - Benjamin Franklin

"I am certainly not an advocate for frequent and untried changes in laws and constitutions. I think moderate imperfections had better be borne with; because, when once known, we accommodate ourselves to them, and find practical means of correcting their ill effects. But I know also, that laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths disclosed, and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also, and keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the same coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors." - Thomas Jefferson to Samuel Kercheval, July 12, 1810

"The truth is that the common man's love of liberty, like his love of sense, justice and truth, is almost wholly imaginary. As I have argued, he is not actually happy when free; he is uncomfortable, a bit alarmed, and intolerably lonely. He longs for the warm, reassuring smell of the herd, and is willing to take the herdsman with it. Liberty is not a thing for such as he. He cannot enjoy it rationally himself, and he can think of it in others only as something to be taken away from them. It is, when it becomes a reality, the exclusive possession of a small and disreputable minority of men, like knowledge, courage and honour. A special sort of man is needed to understand it, nay, to stand it -- and he is inevitably an outlaw in democratic societies. The average man doesn't want to be free. He simply wants to be safe."-- H.L. Mencken, February 12, 1923, Baltimore Evening Sun

"The clergy...believe that any portion of power confided to me [as President] will be exerted in opposition to their schemes. And they believe rightly: for I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man. But this is all they have to fear from me: and enough, too, in their opinion." --Thomas Jefferson to Benjamin Rush, 1800.

"Believing that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their Legislature should "make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," thus building a wall of separation between Church and State." --Thomas Jefferson to Danbury Baptists, 1802.

"History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance of which their civil as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purposes." --Thomas Jefferson to Alexander von Humboldt, 1813.

"In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own." --Thomas Jefferson to Horatio G. Spafford, 1814.

"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act." - George Orwell

It is time for more revolutionary acts!

The next time you lament as to your condition in life, or how your nation is changing, realize that it is YOU who are to blame, especially if you do nothing.

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5.5.2007

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