Saturday, December 22, 2012

When In The Course Of Human Events...


Tiny minds like Benjamin Franklin,  John Adams,  Thomas Jefferson, and 53 close friends got together and set us on course to become independent 237 years ago.
After the Revolution, they set us up with our current representative republic , to ensure and secure “the blessings of liberty” henceforth. (Some people will chatter about Adams and Jefferson’s absence at the Constitutional Convention, but given that Adams had laid out in writing years before precisely the tri-part branches of the exact government we adopted, and that the Bill of Rights had not only Jefferson’s fingerprints, but whole handprints, such quibbling is a load of revisionist hogwash.) The marvelous system they devised was a miracle, both for happening at all (check out what most revolutions before and since turn into) and for the genius of the system itself.
The brilliance of the system largely owes to the fact that they trusted absolutely no one with the reins of power. Some people will argue they valued the individual, but again, that’s a lot of sentimental fertilizer. They didn’t value any individual; what they valued was INDIVIDUAL LIBERTY, guaranteed to all by everything. One man was just another potential tyrant; but the rights of any one man had to be respected in all ways and times, or no one would be free. And they set things up so that without widespread agreement, it was difficult to do much of anything. The clunkiness of our system is a feature, not a bug.
Especially recently, in light of the financial apocalypse that’s looming large in our future, a lot of people with, to be generous, 50 pounds of alfalfa reprocessed by cattle in lieu of brains have mused, opined, and flat out agitated for, wholesale dumping of our current system for some other imaginary magic beans. When pressed for details on how this unseen system smarter than one devised by the likes of the original cast would actually function, they’re usually long on magic and short on beans. The formula for these other plans can invariably be summarized as follows:
1.       Burn Everything
       2.       Suddenly A Miracle Happens
       3.       Liberty and Freedom Ensue Forevermore

This is quite simply a trainload of damnable nonsense.
We have, through apathy, allowed a gaggle of certified butt nuggets, over decades, to corrode the system and government that served us so well. That argues for the removal of the corrosion, not throwing out the greatest engine a free people ever had to pull them to the top of the societal heap and stay there as long as they observed the due diligence to maintain that engine.
So a word of warning to those who would agitate arson on a societal scale, in order to re-engineer our government:
When the cure is worse than the disease, the best course to follow is to shoot the witch doctors.

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