Then & Now

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.

Dogma Forever

Dogma Forever



While serving as President, Thomas Jefferson spent some of his evenings in The White House secretly pouring over the Bible redacting all parts of scripture that told of Jesus performing miracles. He did this secretly when he was alone and did not share this work of his with anyone during his time in the White House. Jefferson actually sat down with scissors and cut and pasted together his version of the Bible sans miracles.

Jefferson was driven to understand what really happened with Jesus in his time and was painfully aware that sharing such an exercise would be viewed as anti-Christian and anti Semitic and not acceptable by his constituency or by his colleagues. He called this work of his ‘The American Bible’. This was not a religious exercise; it was the noble pursuit of simplifying the foundations essential to freedom that Jefferson followed his entire life.

In altering the Bible solely by way of removing those supernatural parts of the writings, Jefferson was convinced he revealed the truth of Jesus and of modern day Christianity. That truth is void of the dogma of sin and the binding philosophy or religion.

His view was that we suffer from the idea that Jesus was speaking to an afterlife of bliss when in fact that life is here now and has been subverted by the use of dogma making religion a powerful manipulation. In this way, claims Jefferson, the few can easily control the mob and thereby maintain a never ending, self-perpetuating stranglehold upon us, the free citizens of the United States.

Believing Jesus was supernatural, Jefferson argues, forced followers to submit to the idea that we do not comprehend the afterlife and that all of our days here on earth are nothing more than a lead up to death and resurrection. Jefferson felt this was a fallacy and a tragedy as it makes us forego our lives, our daily experience and our very existence in lieu of some other life. Along the way we are guided by a small group of people who use this dogma to tell us what to think, how to feel and how to act.

Dogma is couched as infallible and above the law, as being divine and therefore beyond reproach. Frequently monies flow to those who espouse such a position.

To this day we are routinely provided with photo ops of our political leaders and their pastors. Together, Jefferson felt, they cement us into an untenable and dysfunctional position wherein we are made to feel we are inadequate, that we sin and that we must follow their lead or risk losing salvation. Or at the very least lose the ‘privilege’ of participating in a commercially indulgent life of goods and excesses.

Jefferson was astonished to see that the teachings of Jesus were perverted away from the original concept of self reliance and towards submission to the Roman Church and the Jewish Nation. He openly laments the loss of mans’ inner freedoms, the kingdom within.



Referred to as the Holy Spirit, the inner kingdom to Jefferson was the freedom each of us has in our inner dialogue. To Jefferson, the conscience we live with, the innate understanding of common decency and indeed our very humanity is predicated upon how we interact with that inner narrative, what he felt was in fact our soul.

Jefferson did not seek to reduce scripture in any way except to make it more pure and more specifically to rid it of the overlay of beliefs brought into the words of Jesus some 300 years later by Paul whom Jefferson felt had intentionally perverted the message for himself to use as a means to grow his particular sect and to unleash a power upon the masses that would allow the church to reign supreme while citing Jewish law as equal and infallible.

The concept of sin was a Jewish creation and Jefferson had serious difficulty with the notion. The idea of being born into sin and then overlaid with an incomprehensible guilt was bizarre and went against all the teachings of Jesus which, Jefferson felt, were specifically aimed at organized powers- at that time Roman & Jewish -and that the central message to all peoples was to resist dogma altogether. Treason was recreated as blasphemy. Freedom was replaced by ritual and free thought by dogma itself.

Trust yourself was and is the message. Clearly we see governments and religions want you to only trust them. To follow their rules, their edicts their findings, allows them to ride upon the backs of good people and to manipulate the unperceiving. Jefferson felt the central issue was dogma and the acquiescence by the unperceiving. Jefferson viewed Jesus as the most perceptive of men. One who espoused non-violent freedoms over submission, personal happiness and real love over group participation in religious services and in that way actually found freedom within His time albeit at a mighty price.

So against personal freedom was organized religion that they actually killed Him rather than allow or even consider that each of us should be free to pursue their own idea of worship. Reading Jefferson’s American Bible, it is easy to see how Jefferson’s thoughts translated into the Declaration and the firm positions he held on freedom of speech, religion and assembly.

They were intended to be beyond simple laws. They were intended to form the very basis of freedom from dogma and the stifling control which we now labor under as a people.

Eliminating the miraculous, or supernatural, portions of the scripture Jefferson argues that what Jesus was really fighting against was dogma. The dogma of the Romans and the Jews was inordinately powerful in Jesus’ time and He spoke openly to resisting those unfounded principles. What Jefferson was espousing was a natural law, a God of Nature as he wrote in the Declaration of Independence, your inner world, the kingdom of heaven. Free from the oppressive nature of organized groups, Jefferson felt that then and only then could you be free to live a good life of love, fulfillment and truly follow the pursuit of happiness.



During Jefferson’s indispensable participation in writing our first breakaway document in 1776, The Declaration of Independence, he also argued for a civil society where each family would have its 40 acres of heaven. On this private and irrevocable land grant we would live in peace, sovereign upon our own patch of land, grow vegetables, fruits and the like and from there we could offer a trade specialty or professional status to exchange for other trade with neighbors or for cash. From this base, this safe haven, we could also pursue higher education and the fruits of that labor as well. This land would pass without question from generation to generation making a stable and independent life secure to all Americans.

This idea of 40 acres was not a backwards kind of lifestyle. It was not intended to create a permanent world of farming or to perpetuate rugged colonialism. But rather to make certain that dogma could not creep into our lives and make us subservient to those powers at the expense of living a truly free and thoughtful life. Being dependent upon large industrial concerns for food, water and energy as we are now speaks to a level of dependency that Jefferson viewed as dangerous and stifling to the human spirit.

Sadly, Hamilton agued successfully for a large and organized central manufacturing economy, the one we live in today. What we call consumerism, Jefferson viewed as a slow death. He knew that freedom lies within security, not against some unseen foreign element, but against groups that seek to control the masses. He knew that without the 40 acres, great numbers of people would simply submit to doctrines claiming supremacy over others and that these unperceptive people would wear uniforms, robes, funny hats and even kill to maintain their position within the ranks of dysfunctional dogma.

What the 40 acres did was allow each family the opportunity to be free. Truly free to pursue their own dreams. It would make them invested in themselves rather than dogmatic groups that really having absolutely nothing to do with their daily lives other than impose their own needs and desires in the form of laws, edicts and religious decrees.

And, of course, it would allow each of us to have a plot of land to walk, feeling close to nature itself and to commune with what Jefferson called ‘Natures God’, which only then was he content to call our God as well. In this way, Jefferson felt, God was pure and free of the perversions of group-man but would maintain the human qualities of individual-man. A critical distinction in his mind.

In this way, each of us could easily see how dogma affects our lives and how, if left unchecked, we would lose that very life which has been bestowed upon us by some truly miraculous event allowing us to completely separate out the authentic wonder of life from the constructs of group-man.







Today we see dogma hard at work. There is something exponential about dogma and the mechanism it brings to our lives. Perhaps it is modern day media that magnifies dogma, a technological echo chamber, a hall of mirrors for narcissism.

In modern times we see dogma used to beat into our minds that we ‘need to attack’ this country or that, even when we are fully aware of the constructs that government has created to manufacture such a need to attack. Dogma is used to browbeat us into submission on the most perverted concepts that we should not underestimate the force of dogma.

Modern warfare, sophisticated financial markets, high speed computers all are fine but they’re no replacement for the common sense that Jefferson was trying to maintain in living a life free from oppression by way of dogmatic beliefs.

Who believes we needed to attack Iraq? Yet, the drums of dogma pounded day after day until such time as a majority support was actually generated for the attack. False or true, never mind. “My country, right or wrong” said the sarcastic Mark Twain. My dogma, my culture, my money right or wrong seems to be the modern day war cry.

Dogma prevails over truth, over facts, over logic and humanity itself allowing our country to violate the most basic tenets of civilization. Truly we biologically regress at a time when technology has multiplied dogma to an unseen before level of dominance. Like everything else today, dogma has attained a high-octane status fueled by split second technology.

To Jefferson, this was the teaching of Jesus. Dogma was to be avoided and railed against at all costs-even at the costs of a life, a crucifixion. Nowhere near as awe inspiring as a miraculous messenger from heaven but arguably much more important to out lives.

Who believes the financial markets are free of the constraints of reality? In the level of sophisticated financial instruments, derivatives and the likes, lies the perversion of the truths that have caught up with the market itself and is now exacting a heavy price for being ignored. The dogma here was, of course, that the American way of life is best, that the markets will always grow and that our technology and world superiority would always carry us to safety and higher profits. So desperate were we to secure the dream that we actually insured these bundles of indecipherable investments to make them more attractive when, in fact, they were rancid causing failures of banks and the companies that wrote and distributed these empty insurance policies. Billions of dollars of worthless paper, gold gilded edges and dressed up to appear valuable. Another golden calf falls to a pile of rubble.




Had the homeowner been living under the 40 acre rule today there would be a lot less suffering, certainly less foreclosures and less dependency on a system we can no longer can even understand. We have out slicked ourselves with excessive dogma.

Jefferson argued for ‘Natures God’ because he knew there would always be constants that dogma could not overturn. Incorporating natural law was akin to keeping one eye on gravity while riding a bike. There was not a lot of thought in the process but to ignore it altogether would surely result in a fall.

The simplicity of such an elegant statement is often lost in today’s world of complicated systems and the belief that the individual is dispensable.

Dogma has so dominated our world for centuries that all we really have to show for having lived on this earth for at least some 2000+ documented years is a fractured existence pitting one dogma against another. The ‘American way of life’ against radical extremists who would ‘have our heads’ if they could. And so on and so on. Modern explanations pit culture against culture but really dogma still dominates as the central theme to our existence.

On a smaller more immediate practice we see dogma played out in schools where teachers follow some form of a script and an understanding of what it means to be part of that group, that dogma. In police stations there is dogma in that ‘these are the rules and we follow them and we enforce them’. In politics, religion, universities, unions we find the same dynamic practiced but to what end?

Most of our institutions have proven to be self-serving to such a degree that frequently they lose sight of their original charter; to make a positive contribution to civil society.

The lines between government, industry and education have been so blurred as to be imperceptible. Economic strains create a clear view of our society and how we coordinate ourselves to live what we think is a better life. To Jefferson, this was akin to being a hamster forever stuck in a spinning wheel inside a small cage.

Jefferson knew dogma was an enemy of personal freedom and sought to crush it and eradicate it from every bit of our existence beginning with the 40 acres.

The 40-acre concept was not just for newly freed slaves but for all who find themselves pinned to a narrow life by dogma.