Then And Now
The formation of America as a nation was truly a miraculous event. But since that time, what went wrong? So much has passed since the days when our initial beliefs were cemented into the Declaration and codified as the cornerstone for our existence as a people.
The biggest change is in the individuals that make up this country and the way in which we meet the challenges of the day. At the time when Jefferson wrote the Declaration, this country was in serious turmoil and put upon by the British in violent and oppressive ways leaving no room for an alternative, no competing narrative moving towards peace. Blood was being spilled and everyone knew it. Many were witnesses to the brutal dominance of the British. The level of intelligence Jefferson brought to our country has not been matched since. JFK, while dining with a large group in the White House said it best when he remarked, “Gentleman, so much intelligence has not been assembled in this room since Jefferson dined here alone”.
The tenor of the early days of America was truly a do-or-die scenario in which the people of the then non-existent America were seeking to break free from the yoke of tyranny put upon them by the British for the purposes of material ownership of this land and the benefits of cheap labor, tax revenue and raw materials. And, indeed, there were people dying in the struggle to free this fledgling country from that yoke.
Seeing fellow countrymen die in the cause certainly had an incalculable effect on the motivations of a newly formed government, a newly united people. Today our fellow countrymen die on far away sands, foreign soil in utterly different cultures. The news of those sacrifices is compartmentalized from our daily lives and only addressed when fed to us by the body politic we know only remotely as Washington Studios. We genuinely need to see death to appreciate life. Withholding truths so deep are beyond destructive.
Bleached and sterilized, the news of deaths among our men in uniform purportedly fighting for our safety, the images of the dead returning are forbidden to television or even to print media and photojournalism. We are simply informed as to the numbers of the dead and told they were heroic in their efforts to save our ‘way of life’. This seemingly simple but devastating withholding of information and images surrounding the returning soldiers that died in the cause is in and of itself enough to raise eyebrows.
Beyond that though, it wrestles control of our future from us as it steals from us the urgency of the present. Not knowing what is happening today leaves us no place for participation in tomorrow.
What Jefferson, Adams, Hamilton and the rest knew beyond any shadow of a doubt was that we were then-and are again right now-faced with the fight for our very existence. A fight to the death for a free nation, a land without oppression from political bodies, religious extremism, excessive unfair trade and especially from the dogma that undermines very essence of freedom. That freedom takes place within the individual and still struggles to find a home to this day even within ourselves.
So, what happened to this great nation, this marvelous experiment we call America?
The entire notion of freedom has been subverted to a few causes that seek only to serve themselves at the greater expense of the people. We, all of us, now serve the leadership of the parliament we have accepted as our own government. Identical to the British but bestowed now with an unquestionable edict; to save and protect our country. This elevation to a status of utter infallibility parallels only religious dogma in its nature and its perverted ability to place itself above us as individuals with sovereign rights.
How could we have let the beauty of the Declaration and its’ plain but unwavering pitch towards personal freedom be undermined by such things as politics, technology and the military-industrial complex? Truly, we were warned. And yet, here we are. Subservient to the dogma of Washington, told what to think, what to believe and only handed official interpretations of the world we all are stuck living in. We serve them. Each of us is a cog in their wheel. A happiness machine cajoled and massaged to consume and follow.
This would be a good place for a mild but poignant discourse on the shortcomings of man, of psychology and fear but that is not what we need right now. Our sights must turn to us as a people, sovereign, independent and demand full access to our country.
If Jefferson went wrong in his writings, it was in that he was placed squarely in a time in history between choosing freedom and oppression. His writings and the foundations of this country were laid on dark days when the view was that of a terminal country fighting for its’ very life. Jesus fought the same noble battle against domination by groups over the individual using dogma as its’ main tool for control.
Since that time we have all come to accept a more tolerant and submissive ‘way of life’. That submissive existence is, in fact, the America we now know and live in. Submission to authority is now so essential to our daily lives that even the notion of rearing up against the powers that rule our country are deemed unpatriotic or even illegal and will bring harsh penalties for anyone who dares to speak up against the ruling classes.
Sound British enough? I don’t fault the British. In fact, looking at the way things are today I am inclined to think we might have been better off remaining part of the British Empire where, at least, the rules were always strict and cemented in such a way as to circumvent the excesses of ‘freedom’ we now find intolerable. We suffer at our own hand.
The following are some things we need to fully face without prejudice and with a keen ability to simply see things as they are:
1.) The military-industrial complex was a term coined to mean that the military and American business concerns are inseparable and that the military will, in fact, kill at the behest of the corporation. The corporation, in turn, will share its ill-gotten gains with the military. This symbiotic relationship is central to our ‘way of life’. Using either overt or clandestine tactics, the military clears the way for corporate America to ‘do business’ at a profitable rate generating tax revenue that in turn feeds the military. Neither can exist without the other. We have long since gone passed the point of no return and find ourselves burdened with the incomprehensible relationship between these two factions.
2.) Not knowing the full extent of what is happening in the halls of power in America until after-the-fact is a process that goes wholly against our principles and allows an ongoing perversion of our people, our goods, our lives and our children’s lives. Our leaders routinely rule in secret, dealing under the table until such time as they can dress up their findings, wrap them in the false flag of patriotism and servitude. They reveal their actions only after having had rehearsal time creating the opportunity for them to reframe their actions in such a way as to make it palatable to the constituency. Their actions and their talk do not jive.
3.) Law has failed us. Crime and punishment is more a matter of money and influence than it is of rules and the application of those rules. Everyone knows there is something very wrong with lawyers in this country. Even if they set out with good intentions, once in ‘the system’ they find it to be so different from their initial expectations that they have a choice to either become one of them or to quit the profession altogether. There is no middle ground. Once absorbed into the body politic of law and the courts, the newly minted attorney now morphs into an automaton of which the central feature is they are missing a sensitivity chip and pervert the process. As they do so they see justice receding like a dream while their position and income rise fortifying their place in the broken social structure they helped create. Selling ones soul is a costly event.
4.) Dogma dominates our country today in ways that were unimaginable to the Founding Fathers. Free thinking today is non-existent. There is no area we can visit that has not been subverted, carefully carved up and repackaged to meet the needs of government. Whether it be housing, automotive, banking, healthcare or the pharmaceutical markets, we can only approach these with the blessing of the government that we are doing so in the fashion they approve of and not in a pure and genuine way hoping to make improvement. So controlled are we that alternative energy remains in an infantile planning stage while we barrel endlessly and out of control towards the knowing end of a finite oil supply that creates huge fortunes for a few, again at the expense of the many. There was a time when we would not tolerate a ‘tea tax’ and yet today we routinely stand by witnessing huge shifts in wealth that sap the well-being of the individual. Can you imagine Jefferson tolerating such a thing? True leadership speaks truth to itself.
5.) Authority has been elevated to a supernatural status wherein the judge, the policeman, the lawyer and the politician all act as high priests supplanting any room for individual sovereignty or dissent. Writings such as this are considered ‘quaint’ by those who dominate our world. The Constitution has become an old age document with no real application and is treated much like a religious artifact brought out only on holidays paraded around for all to see, cherish, bow to and then dusted off and put away until the next holiday. Making the Constitution a relic is an enormous problem for America. It is akin to leaving Jesus on the cross at every church in America thereby never really being able to fully appreciate the Man and His message Thee central tenets of the Constitution are nailed to the same cross and kept under glass. They’re not for using’, they’re only for looking at. Like religion, this practice only allows the individual to feel the dominant power of the oppressor without actually requiring his or her participation.
6.) We are trapped, beset on all sides by the irony of our lives. We must pursue more oil or risk losing the energy we require simply to stay warm, drive a car to get milk, care for our children or to work and produce for our family. Our government is so bottlenecked in its own practices that we have a two-party system that serves up a nearly indistinguishable choice in leadership. Once in power the difference in leaders is often a foregone conclusion yielding instead to the overwhelming forces of money and corruption and invariably blamed on circumstances at the time wholly absolving leadership of responsibility.
Through a clear eye we see that it is not us who are ‘addicted to oil’ but rather the industrial concerns that mine and process oil for profit that are the addicts. No oil, no cash. No cash no power. We are open to alternative forms of energy. They are not. Who is the addict?
The Constitution is not outmoded. It has been retired so as to make way for new rules. These new rules allow the ruling classes to pillage in the name of nationalism and defer permanently any justice that would normally correct such actions. They say it is being done for you, the citizen, but we know that to be false. The sad truth is that the Constitution simply hampers the excessive pursuit of money, the dogma of free-market capitalism and the notion that unfettered markets are best. Capitalism killed the Constitution. They simply could not exist together in the same country.
None of us seriously share in the massive profits made by the fortune 100. At best you can get in line for a small dividend on Wall Street but only if you first put up the money to buy a share that costs far more then the dividend itself. Put up $100.00, get ten cents. Your share in democratic principles is even less valuable than that. Proof enough of what is considered important to America.
Our utter inability to delay our own gratification and our seemingly endless need for success in financial terms speaks directly to our own shortcomings as a society. What we seem to have lost is confidence in our country, in our government, our beliefs and in our ability to feel a deep connection. America has become something of a tool to be used and discarded in small pieces by each generation as it passes through the epoch of its existence. That national lack is, in reality, one of a more personal nature than you might think initially. The original foundation was personal sovereignty as a means to freedom. Today, money is freedom and each of us is no more than a profit center, a cog in the big wheel we know as our America.
It is impossible to envision a rising up of people to such an extent that we could affect a positive outcome. Only failure of the system will allow us the opportunity to reframe the country in a more meaningful way and perhaps seek a return to the practices we know are genuine and have stood the test of time. That failure we are now witnessing. So much more painful is having to watch the country fail than it would be to simply advocate for change. But such is the human condition.
Quaint as it might seem, the older more formal guys who set this country as an independent entity knew very well what they were doing.
The formation of America as a nation was truly a miraculous event. But since that time, what went wrong? So much has passed since the days when our initial beliefs were cemented into the Declaration and codified as the cornerstone for our existence as a people.
The biggest change is in the individuals that make up this country and the way in which we meet the challenges of the day. At the time when Jefferson wrote the Declaration, this country was in serious turmoil and put upon by the British in violent and oppressive ways leaving no room for an alternative, no competing narrative moving towards peace. Blood was being spilled and everyone knew it. Many were witnesses to the brutal dominance of the British. The level of intelligence Jefferson brought to our country has not been matched since. JFK, while dining with a large group in the White House said it best when he remarked, “Gentleman, so much intelligence has not been assembled in this room since Jefferson dined here alone”.
The tenor of the early days of America was truly a do-or-die scenario in which the people of the then non-existent America were seeking to break free from the yoke of tyranny put upon them by the British for the purposes of material ownership of this land and the benefits of cheap labor, tax revenue and raw materials. And, indeed, there were people dying in the struggle to free this fledgling country from that yoke.
Seeing fellow countrymen die in the cause certainly had an incalculable effect on the motivations of a newly formed government, a newly united people. Today our fellow countrymen die on far away sands, foreign soil in utterly different cultures. The news of those sacrifices is compartmentalized from our daily lives and only addressed when fed to us by the body politic we know only remotely as Washington Studios. We genuinely need to see death to appreciate life. Withholding truths so deep are beyond destructive.
Bleached and sterilized, the news of deaths among our men in uniform purportedly fighting for our safety, the images of the dead returning are forbidden to television or even to print media and photojournalism. We are simply informed as to the numbers of the dead and told they were heroic in their efforts to save our ‘way of life’. This seemingly simple but devastating withholding of information and images surrounding the returning soldiers that died in the cause is in and of itself enough to raise eyebrows.
Beyond that though, it wrestles control of our future from us as it steals from us the urgency of the present. Not knowing what is happening today leaves us no place for participation in tomorrow.
What Jefferson, Adams, Hamilton and the rest knew beyond any shadow of a doubt was that we were then-and are again right now-faced with the fight for our very existence. A fight to the death for a free nation, a land without oppression from political bodies, religious extremism, excessive unfair trade and especially from the dogma that undermines very essence of freedom. That freedom takes place within the individual and still struggles to find a home to this day even within ourselves.
So, what happened to this great nation, this marvelous experiment we call America?
The entire notion of freedom has been subverted to a few causes that seek only to serve themselves at the greater expense of the people. We, all of us, now serve the leadership of the parliament we have accepted as our own government. Identical to the British but bestowed now with an unquestionable edict; to save and protect our country. This elevation to a status of utter infallibility parallels only religious dogma in its nature and its perverted ability to place itself above us as individuals with sovereign rights.
How could we have let the beauty of the Declaration and its’ plain but unwavering pitch towards personal freedom be undermined by such things as politics, technology and the military-industrial complex? Truly, we were warned. And yet, here we are. Subservient to the dogma of Washington, told what to think, what to believe and only handed official interpretations of the world we all are stuck living in. We serve them. Each of us is a cog in their wheel. A happiness machine cajoled and massaged to consume and follow.
This would be a good place for a mild but poignant discourse on the shortcomings of man, of psychology and fear but that is not what we need right now. Our sights must turn to us as a people, sovereign, independent and demand full access to our country.
If Jefferson went wrong in his writings, it was in that he was placed squarely in a time in history between choosing freedom and oppression. His writings and the foundations of this country were laid on dark days when the view was that of a terminal country fighting for its’ very life. Jesus fought the same noble battle against domination by groups over the individual using dogma as its’ main tool for control.
Since that time we have all come to accept a more tolerant and submissive ‘way of life’. That submissive existence is, in fact, the America we now know and live in. Submission to authority is now so essential to our daily lives that even the notion of rearing up against the powers that rule our country are deemed unpatriotic or even illegal and will bring harsh penalties for anyone who dares to speak up against the ruling classes.
Sound British enough? I don’t fault the British. In fact, looking at the way things are today I am inclined to think we might have been better off remaining part of the British Empire where, at least, the rules were always strict and cemented in such a way as to circumvent the excesses of ‘freedom’ we now find intolerable. We suffer at our own hand.
The following are some things we need to fully face without prejudice and with a keen ability to simply see things as they are:
1.) The military-industrial complex was a term coined to mean that the military and American business concerns are inseparable and that the military will, in fact, kill at the behest of the corporation. The corporation, in turn, will share its ill-gotten gains with the military. This symbiotic relationship is central to our ‘way of life’. Using either overt or clandestine tactics, the military clears the way for corporate America to ‘do business’ at a profitable rate generating tax revenue that in turn feeds the military. Neither can exist without the other. We have long since gone passed the point of no return and find ourselves burdened with the incomprehensible relationship between these two factions.
2.) Not knowing the full extent of what is happening in the halls of power in America until after-the-fact is a process that goes wholly against our principles and allows an ongoing perversion of our people, our goods, our lives and our children’s lives. Our leaders routinely rule in secret, dealing under the table until such time as they can dress up their findings, wrap them in the false flag of patriotism and servitude. They reveal their actions only after having had rehearsal time creating the opportunity for them to reframe their actions in such a way as to make it palatable to the constituency. Their actions and their talk do not jive.
3.) Law has failed us. Crime and punishment is more a matter of money and influence than it is of rules and the application of those rules. Everyone knows there is something very wrong with lawyers in this country. Even if they set out with good intentions, once in ‘the system’ they find it to be so different from their initial expectations that they have a choice to either become one of them or to quit the profession altogether. There is no middle ground. Once absorbed into the body politic of law and the courts, the newly minted attorney now morphs into an automaton of which the central feature is they are missing a sensitivity chip and pervert the process. As they do so they see justice receding like a dream while their position and income rise fortifying their place in the broken social structure they helped create. Selling ones soul is a costly event.
4.) Dogma dominates our country today in ways that were unimaginable to the Founding Fathers. Free thinking today is non-existent. There is no area we can visit that has not been subverted, carefully carved up and repackaged to meet the needs of government. Whether it be housing, automotive, banking, healthcare or the pharmaceutical markets, we can only approach these with the blessing of the government that we are doing so in the fashion they approve of and not in a pure and genuine way hoping to make improvement. So controlled are we that alternative energy remains in an infantile planning stage while we barrel endlessly and out of control towards the knowing end of a finite oil supply that creates huge fortunes for a few, again at the expense of the many. There was a time when we would not tolerate a ‘tea tax’ and yet today we routinely stand by witnessing huge shifts in wealth that sap the well-being of the individual. Can you imagine Jefferson tolerating such a thing? True leadership speaks truth to itself.
5.) Authority has been elevated to a supernatural status wherein the judge, the policeman, the lawyer and the politician all act as high priests supplanting any room for individual sovereignty or dissent. Writings such as this are considered ‘quaint’ by those who dominate our world. The Constitution has become an old age document with no real application and is treated much like a religious artifact brought out only on holidays paraded around for all to see, cherish, bow to and then dusted off and put away until the next holiday. Making the Constitution a relic is an enormous problem for America. It is akin to leaving Jesus on the cross at every church in America thereby never really being able to fully appreciate the Man and His message Thee central tenets of the Constitution are nailed to the same cross and kept under glass. They’re not for using’, they’re only for looking at. Like religion, this practice only allows the individual to feel the dominant power of the oppressor without actually requiring his or her participation.
6.) We are trapped, beset on all sides by the irony of our lives. We must pursue more oil or risk losing the energy we require simply to stay warm, drive a car to get milk, care for our children or to work and produce for our family. Our government is so bottlenecked in its own practices that we have a two-party system that serves up a nearly indistinguishable choice in leadership. Once in power the difference in leaders is often a foregone conclusion yielding instead to the overwhelming forces of money and corruption and invariably blamed on circumstances at the time wholly absolving leadership of responsibility.
Through a clear eye we see that it is not us who are ‘addicted to oil’ but rather the industrial concerns that mine and process oil for profit that are the addicts. No oil, no cash. No cash no power. We are open to alternative forms of energy. They are not. Who is the addict?
The Constitution is not outmoded. It has been retired so as to make way for new rules. These new rules allow the ruling classes to pillage in the name of nationalism and defer permanently any justice that would normally correct such actions. They say it is being done for you, the citizen, but we know that to be false. The sad truth is that the Constitution simply hampers the excessive pursuit of money, the dogma of free-market capitalism and the notion that unfettered markets are best. Capitalism killed the Constitution. They simply could not exist together in the same country.
None of us seriously share in the massive profits made by the fortune 100. At best you can get in line for a small dividend on Wall Street but only if you first put up the money to buy a share that costs far more then the dividend itself. Put up $100.00, get ten cents. Your share in democratic principles is even less valuable than that. Proof enough of what is considered important to America.
Our utter inability to delay our own gratification and our seemingly endless need for success in financial terms speaks directly to our own shortcomings as a society. What we seem to have lost is confidence in our country, in our government, our beliefs and in our ability to feel a deep connection. America has become something of a tool to be used and discarded in small pieces by each generation as it passes through the epoch of its existence. That national lack is, in reality, one of a more personal nature than you might think initially. The original foundation was personal sovereignty as a means to freedom. Today, money is freedom and each of us is no more than a profit center, a cog in the big wheel we know as our America.
It is impossible to envision a rising up of people to such an extent that we could affect a positive outcome. Only failure of the system will allow us the opportunity to reframe the country in a more meaningful way and perhaps seek a return to the practices we know are genuine and have stood the test of time. That failure we are now witnessing. So much more painful is having to watch the country fail than it would be to simply advocate for change. But such is the human condition.
Quaint as it might seem, the older more formal guys who set this country as an independent entity knew very well what they were doing.
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