Friday, August 31, 2007

9/11 Changed Everything?

I hear this "9/11 changed everything" phrase a lot. We had to take of the gloves, get tough, be willing to have less freedoms. This is a specious argument (a.k.a its crap). Our nation and our Constitution wasn't created by a bunch of ivy tower wimps, it was created by men who had been through the bloodiest and most dangerous period our nation has ever seen. They knew all to well that for our nation to survive we needed those freedoms and those rules.

Our nation was founded in a conflict much nastier than any we have fought since. The Civil war is called the worst American conflict, the one that set brother against brother. The revolutionary war seems worse because while the Civil war was fought between two large sections of the nation, the revolutionary war was fought from house to house with sides changing from neighbor to neighbor. The battle lines must have looked like a topographic map. It must have been the most dangerous period of we have every been through.

Out of the this conflict came men like Hamilton, Adams, Jefferson, Mason, Franklin and Washington. They didn't build our political system on a whim. They knew all to well why we needed the separation of powers, habus corpos, the bill of rights, the separation of church and state and the rule of law.

Has any modern leader had even a taste of the kind of difficulties that our founders experienced? When our current leaders tell us to get real and start talking about omelets and the breaking of eggs we should tell them to just do their damn jobs with the powers that we the people gave them. They do not need any more powers or authority. To claim so is a either an admission of incompetence or a lie.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Peter -
I agree entirely. Those jingoists, who, in the prophetic words of Sinclair Lewis, "come wrapped in the flag and carrying a Bible" -- claiming to channel the Founding Fathers in their rhetoric -- seem to have no clue about the real men (AND women, ie Abagail Adams) who forged this rock into a nation.

American history has long been a passion of mine. I wonder how many of these closeted, Sunday-school-teacher, flag-lapel-pin, ribbon-magnet, ditto-heads have any clue that there wasn't a regular church-going Christian in the lot? Or that their arch-nemesis, the public school system, was the brain-child of retro-socialist, Thomas Jefferson?

If any of these plastic-patriots were to actually read history, it would scare the hell out of them.