Showing posts with label Founders of America. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Founders of America. Show all posts
Tuesday, March 19, 2013
Tuesday, July 31, 2012
Sunday, March 18, 2012
Saturday, July 16, 2011
Wednesday, December 29, 2010
WHAT I'M READING: NAOMI WOLF'S THE END OF AMERICA, LETTER OF WARNING TO A YOUNG PATRIOT, A CITIZEN'S CALL TO ACTION
I think I mentioned this book in the very beginning entries of this blog. I misplaced it, hadn't finished reading it when I did, so I began the re-read it a couple of days ago.
Wow.
Though you might consider this feminist to be a flaming, hard-nose liberal, you're wrong. It was written in 2007, and it was truly the portent of things to come. It could have been called, "The Ten Steps to Tyranny".
It chills me to read it. It belongs next to "1984" and the Declaration of Independence. It is a grave reminder of what was, the prelude to what is our plight in Obama's Amerika today.
Let me give you a couple of highlights from the last day's reading. You will find this on pages 25-29.
From "What is Freedom?"
"We tend to think of American democracy as being somehow eternal, ever-renewable, and capable of withstanding all assaults. But the Founders would have thought we were dangerously naive, not to mention lazy, in thinking of democracy in this way. This view - which we see as patriotic - is the very opposite of the view that they held. They would not have considered our attitude patriotic - or even American: The Founders thought, in contrast, that it was tyranny that was eternal, ever-renewable, and capable of withstanding all assaults, whereas democracy was difficult, personally exacting, and vanishingly fragile. The Founders did not see Americans as being special in any way: They saw America - that is, the process of liberty - as special.
In fact, the men who risked hanging to found our nation , and the women who risked their own lives to support this experiment in freedom, and who did what they could to advance it, were terrified on exactly what we call dictatorship. They called it "tyranny" or "despotism." It was the spector at their backs - and they all knew it - as Americans debated the Constitution and argued about the shape of the Bill of Rights."
She writes that the Founders and the people of the time, the revolutionaries, "saw as the real prospect of a tyrannical force rising up in America. This repressive force could take many forms: the form of a rapacious Congress oppressing the people; the form of an out-of-control executive; or even the form of the people themselves, cruelly oppressing a minority." The Constitution and the Bill of Rights were set forth not as a flag flying merrily but as a bulwark: a set of barriers against what the Founders and their fellow countrymen and women saw as people's natural tendency to oppress others if their power is unchecked."
If you are old enough, you remember what the taste of liberty and freedom and pride feels like when you bathe in it. We do not have that today.
"Arbitrary arrest, state intimidation, and torture were the tactics of the tyrannical monarchs of eighteenth century Europe - tactics that the Founders sought to banish from American soil forever."
And what do we have today in our country?
Wolf continues:
"Here's what we're not taught: Those words at the time they were written were blazingly, electrifyingly subversive. If you understand them truly now, they still are. These men and women who supported their work were walking further out into the unknown - betting on ordinary people's capacities - than anyone had ever walked in the history of the human race. You are not taught - and it is a disgrace that you aren't - that these men and women were radicals for liberty; that they had a vision of equality that was a slap in the face of what the rest of their world understood to be the unchanging, God-given order of nations; and that they were willing to die to make that desperate vision into a reality for people like us, whom they would never live to see.
You weren't taught that the way they brought the freest nation in the world into being was by reading passionately about fledgling democracies of the past; by positioning their imaginations directly against the violent repressions they had fled; and by carefully, delicately crafting a mechanism of checks and balances, and a bill of rights, that would protect these extreme manifestations of freedom. The Founders set out to prove that ordinary people could be entrusted with governing themselves in a state where no one could arbitrarily arrest them, lock them up, or torture them."
This is a book I hope you will download to your Kindles, buy the book, borrow the book and read the book.
It's required reading for anyone who knows in the pit of the stomach that something has run amok in our government; that freedom and liberty is threatened and/or destroyed bit-by-bit every single day under the regime in Washington, and we need to stop it because we are a unique people, from brave, courageous people. Whether your family came to Plymouth as a Pilgrim; immigrants to Ellis Island, new, legal immigrants, you need to read this book.
Naomi Wolf's lectures using this book (available from Amazon, new and used) and others she has written appear on Youtube.
You will find her fascinating.
Wow.
Though you might consider this feminist to be a flaming, hard-nose liberal, you're wrong. It was written in 2007, and it was truly the portent of things to come. It could have been called, "The Ten Steps to Tyranny".
It chills me to read it. It belongs next to "1984" and the Declaration of Independence. It is a grave reminder of what was, the prelude to what is our plight in Obama's Amerika today.
Let me give you a couple of highlights from the last day's reading. You will find this on pages 25-29.
From "What is Freedom?"
"We tend to think of American democracy as being somehow eternal, ever-renewable, and capable of withstanding all assaults. But the Founders would have thought we were dangerously naive, not to mention lazy, in thinking of democracy in this way. This view - which we see as patriotic - is the very opposite of the view that they held. They would not have considered our attitude patriotic - or even American: The Founders thought, in contrast, that it was tyranny that was eternal, ever-renewable, and capable of withstanding all assaults, whereas democracy was difficult, personally exacting, and vanishingly fragile. The Founders did not see Americans as being special in any way: They saw America - that is, the process of liberty - as special.
In fact, the men who risked hanging to found our nation , and the women who risked their own lives to support this experiment in freedom, and who did what they could to advance it, were terrified on exactly what we call dictatorship. They called it "tyranny" or "despotism." It was the spector at their backs - and they all knew it - as Americans debated the Constitution and argued about the shape of the Bill of Rights."
She writes that the Founders and the people of the time, the revolutionaries, "saw as the real prospect of a tyrannical force rising up in America. This repressive force could take many forms: the form of a rapacious Congress oppressing the people; the form of an out-of-control executive; or even the form of the people themselves, cruelly oppressing a minority." The Constitution and the Bill of Rights were set forth not as a flag flying merrily but as a bulwark: a set of barriers against what the Founders and their fellow countrymen and women saw as people's natural tendency to oppress others if their power is unchecked."
If you are old enough, you remember what the taste of liberty and freedom and pride feels like when you bathe in it. We do not have that today.
"Arbitrary arrest, state intimidation, and torture were the tactics of the tyrannical monarchs of eighteenth century Europe - tactics that the Founders sought to banish from American soil forever."
And what do we have today in our country?
Wolf continues:
"Here's what we're not taught: Those words at the time they were written were blazingly, electrifyingly subversive. If you understand them truly now, they still are. These men and women who supported their work were walking further out into the unknown - betting on ordinary people's capacities - than anyone had ever walked in the history of the human race. You are not taught - and it is a disgrace that you aren't - that these men and women were radicals for liberty; that they had a vision of equality that was a slap in the face of what the rest of their world understood to be the unchanging, God-given order of nations; and that they were willing to die to make that desperate vision into a reality for people like us, whom they would never live to see.
You weren't taught that the way they brought the freest nation in the world into being was by reading passionately about fledgling democracies of the past; by positioning their imaginations directly against the violent repressions they had fled; and by carefully, delicately crafting a mechanism of checks and balances, and a bill of rights, that would protect these extreme manifestations of freedom. The Founders set out to prove that ordinary people could be entrusted with governing themselves in a state where no one could arbitrarily arrest them, lock them up, or torture them."
This is a book I hope you will download to your Kindles, buy the book, borrow the book and read the book.
It's required reading for anyone who knows in the pit of the stomach that something has run amok in our government; that freedom and liberty is threatened and/or destroyed bit-by-bit every single day under the regime in Washington, and we need to stop it because we are a unique people, from brave, courageous people. Whether your family came to Plymouth as a Pilgrim; immigrants to Ellis Island, new, legal immigrants, you need to read this book.
Naomi Wolf's lectures using this book (available from Amazon, new and used) and others she has written appear on Youtube.
You will find her fascinating.
Saturday, October 31, 2009
Thursday, July 3, 2008
Honoring the Founders on the Fourth of July...
Do you know who they were?
Read who these people were go gave us our nation:
The 4TH OF JULY
Have you ever wondered what happened to the 56 men who signed the Declaration of Independence?
Five signers were captured by the British as traitors, and tortured before they died.
Twelve had their homes ransacked and burned.. Two lost their sons serving in the Revolutionary Army; another had two sons captured.
Nine of the 56 fought and died from wounds or hardships of the Revolutionary War.
They signed and they pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor.
What kind of men were they?
Twenty-four were lawyers and jurists. Eleven were merchants, nine were farmers and large plantation owners; men of means, well educated, but they signed the Declaration of Independence knowing full well that the penalty would be death if they were captured.
Carter Braxton of Virginia, a wealthy planter and trader, saw his Ships swept from the seas by the British Navy. He sold his home and properties to pay his debts, and died in rags.
Thomas McKeam was so hounded by the British that he was forced to move his family almost constantly. He served in the Congress without pay, and his family was kept in hiding. His possessions were taken from him, and poverty was his reward.
Vandals or soldiers looted the properties of Dillery, Hall, Clymer, Walton, Gwinnett, Heyward, Ruttledge, and Middleton.
At the battle of Yorktown, Thomas Nelson, Jr., noted that the British General Cornwallis had taken over the Nelson home for his headquarters.
He quietly urged General George Washington to open fire. The home was destroyed, and Nelson died bankrupt.
Francis Lewis had his home and properties destroyed. The enemy jailed his wife, and she died within a few months.
John Hart was driven from his wife's bedside as she was dying. Their 13 children fled for their lives. His fields and his gristmill were laid to waste. For more than a year he lived in forests and caves, returning home to find his wife dead and his children vanished. Some of us take these liberties so much for granted, but we shouldn't.
So, we're going to take a few minutes while enjoying our 4th of July holiday and silently thank these patriots. We believe it's not too much to ask, for the price they paid.
We understand: freedom is never free!
We believe patriotism is NOT a sin, and the Fourth of July has more to it than beer, picnics, and baseball games.
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