July 4, 2006
What Price Freedom?
GemFireAir
by marty kleva
Today is the 230th Birthday of the Declaration of Independence, and frankly, I believe that our privacy, safety, and constitutional rights are as big a problem today as they were for those patriots who had been declared traitorous rebels in a 1775 royal proclamation by the then King George III.
Perhaps the danger is more precipitous now for we are facing innumerable obstacles and instruments of a government that has turned the word terror inside out, and which pokes its not-so-royal nose into the personal lives of its citizens rather than concern itself with the everyday welfare of the overall economic and physical well being of the country and its people.
This is certainly not my idea or past experience of what living in a democratic republic is like. Something along the way has gotten very twisted and demented. What’s up is not up. What’s down is not even recognizable, and so we try to live with the confused signals. It works for a while, but then we can no longer remember what is the truth. It has been revised and renditioned so many times we cannot find our way to the origin. And perhaps that is the plan.
At least this is how I see the operation or the project being carried out. I don’t doubt there are many who are in total agreement with the way things are. There is one thing I would ask though if you are one of those: Have you come to this conclusion because you have blindly believed in everything you are being told without questioning, and without actually doing some investigating in places other than those that are so readily available in the mainstream?
The one thing that seems clear is that America is on the brink of something that can move it forward into the future as a leader of this world, or which can bring this country to its knees; losing it’s long-earned place as a country that is friendly toward others and that creates opportunities for people to attain individual success.
Do you remember that our original 13 colonies were formed and settled by Scots, Welsh, Irish, Dutch, Swedes, Finns, Africans, French, Germans, Swiss, as well as the English? This list is according to the National Archives. I would have included a few other nationalities in there, but I will defer to their records.
Yes, it was Thomas Jefferson who took from June 11-28 in 1776 to draft the Declaration of Independence. It is more than a document of words that are the expression of his labor and of those he talked and debated with.
These words are so well put together that they laid the cornerstone of a nation. Words like:
Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
To have the right to alter or abolish is more than a right. Unstated is also the responsibility to know when it is a proper and just time to do so. Person’s such as you and I must do more than be a mute spectator to understand what effects Safety and Happiness, and learn to know what it means to have a government which derives its just powers from the consent of the governed.
Jefferson continues:
But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
A true citizen must be armed with knowledge of the origins of these rights, just as a true family member knows his/her geneology.
In my estimation, there is so much “flack” in the politics of this country today that it is like a whirl-a-gig in a hurricane to try to keep up with all the pieces of disinformation planted by very clever minds to keep the people distracted with illusory dangers added to the real and true danger.
To a person such as myself, when I see this happening questions appear, such as:
“Why is there a need for planting information that is not true?”
“What is the real reason for a president who declares over and over in public like a mantra, that government spying is not happening to American citizens, and that there is only FISA court-ordered wiretappings when the exact opposite is what is actually taking place?”
“What is it designed to camouflage?”
If I cannot ask these questions in a public forum in a country that fought to gain these very freedoms for every man/woman, then I no linger live in the same country that was formed by those signers of the Declaration of Independence.
There were many who charged then, some 230 years ago, that the Constitution as drafted would only unlock the opportunity for tyranny by the central government and who demanded a “bill of rights” that would clearly state the immunities of individual citizens.
In May of 1787 when the colonies gathered to “revise” the Articles of Confederation, there was a delegate from Virginia who due to his dissonant view of the Constitution having “no declaration of rights” left the convention disappointed. His name was George Mason. Ultimately, his vocal opposition gained the attention of James Madison who drafted the amendments to the Constitution known as The Bill of Rights and who drew upon Mason’s ideas out of Virginia’s Declaration of Rights.
Where are these rights today? Certainly not where they were intended to be by our forefathers.
We now have a central government more concerned with spending money that is non-existent than it is to fulfilling any of its citizen’s real needs.
- A government bent on removing personal rights rather than protecting them.
- A government committed to spying on its own people rather than using the money to educate children and provide adequate and affordable health care for its citizens.
- A government determined to use its “political capital” to wage war on other nations that have rich natural resources rather than establish strong diplomacy ties to work out differences.
- A government that sees things as “either/or” rather than as “in addition to.”
- A government that separates and divides everything into good vs. evil rather than to see things as a tapestry of various and rich sources of dialogue between peoples.
This administration is so emotionally poverty ridden that it needs to suck up all outwardly manifested riches in the physical world like a deprived child who has turned into the tyrant. We have a bunch of psychologically injured men and women at the helm of this country, in a way that verges on the brink of psychosis. It is insidious, like a cancer and we can find it in every place government is present.
I can only imagine what George Mason felt like when he wrote these words in response to the King's proclamation:
When the last dutiful & humble petition from Congress received no other Answer than declaring us Rebels, and out of the King’s protection, I from that Moment look’d forward to a Revolution & Independence, as the only means of Salvation; and will risque the last Penny of my Fortune, & the last Drop of my Blood upon the Issue.
George Mason, October 2, 1778
May we all seek the terrorist within rather than find any from without.
con molto amore,
~ mek
_______________________________________________________________________