Knowing The Right Path
Since Nixon's Administration a dedicated cabal of powerful interests have deliberately polarized the nation. The single-minded pursuit of power has driven these interests to commit crimes against the Government, the People and the World. They have done so by blurring the sense of right and wrong as it was and by undercutting the balance of powers as designed in the Constitution.
Now that the People approach no confidence in the Government, we look for the response of our Representatives so that they may oppose the Administration, rebalance the Courts and restore what is right. When Washington D. C. was designed, many of the leaders at the time were Masons. While many people have speculated this shadowy secret fraternity to be behind many schemes injurious to our liberty, they had a motto which many of the Founding Fathers believed in: truth, justice and right. While the Superman comics adopted a variation of this saying, substituting "the American way" for "right", either way we seek the triple play to restore all three principles. Most importantly, we want our nation to represent what is right about humanity again -- the real American Way.
The quoted material in this diary is either in the public domain or constitutes fair use in accordance with copyright laws.
Point of no confidence: March 21, 2007
Point of no return: January 10, 2007 -- Bush announces the surge
This is the sixth diary in a series to explore why our nation is descending into a state of no confidence in this Government and what we should do if that happens. The first diary started on December 29, 2006, and the last one will be Spring Equinox. I believe the Government will be in a crisis of no confidence by March 21, based on how similar events are to what I experienced in 1973 before Watergate heated up and Nixon fell from power.
See the other diaries in this series from links at the bottom of this diary. This diary is the midpoint of the countdown, 40 days from the equinox.
I remember clearly when I first recognized evil disguised as religion. It was my eighth-grade baccalaureate in a small town in the Bible belt. It was held at a local Baptist church. The place was packed, and it was hot in the sanctuary. The minister was a massive man dressed in an expensive suit -- too expensive for someone supposedly dedicated to following Jesus, but that didn't register with me because we had several ministers who dressed that way. 27 churches in a town of 5,000 people meant religious plummage was always on display.
The minister took the pulpit with a commanding pose and a booming voice. I was sitting behind the Junior High principal. I knew he had cancer, but I didn't know exactly what that meant. I didn't even know that's why he had lost his hair. I was just nervous he might hear me and turn around with that practiced look that cowled kids like me into silence and obedience. But that night he didn't seem so imposing. He just seemed sad.
The minister got all wound up on the hellfire thing, launching into the sing-songy cadence of preacher-talk, at least in these "holy roller" churches. He swayed and exhorted everyone to make sure they were ready to meet their maker. Then he talked about God punishing those who didn't believe: striking the unbelievers with poverty and misery and, looking straight down the aisle at the Principal (and at me, sitting behind him it seemed), disease. Suddenly I was transfixed by those pig-like eyes, so arrogant and so proud, staring at a man afflicted with a terrible disease with a look of triumph and an attitude of power. My principal just looked down, shaking his head.
After a pregnant pause, the preacher went on, but I wasn't listening any more. In those eyes, pretending to be a man of God, I had come face to face with a servant of Satan. I wasn't afraid of the Principal any more. I was afraid of that preacher. Looking back, I am angry at all those people sitting in that church that night who did not get up and walk out, shunning such evil and making sure it did not go any further.
What is right? How can those who claim to absolutely know what is right further the spread of evil? How can those who are wealthy, comfortable or well feel such hatred for those who are not?
At The Midpoint
At the midpoint of our countdown, we pause to step back, look around and see where we are. The People are now far ahead of our public servants. The People know, even if they are loathe to admit it yet, that the nation is being led down a path that is not right. Over five years since 9-11, we should be past all the fear. We should have faced our grief and finished seeking vengence. If we had done as we know we should have, we would have returned to a sense of normalcy just as we had after the first World Trade Center bombing; after the Federal Building bombing in Oklahoma City; after the bombings of our Marines in Lebanon in 1983, the U. S. S Cole and our embassies.
Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
Title page of An Historical Review of the Constitution and Government of Pennsylvania.
(1759)
Attributed to Benjamin Franklin
The New Normal would still linger. Those loved and lost would still haunt us. But we would have taken the good will of the whole world and made good on the hope of it. We would have cut our imports of foreign oil by now, permanently changing the curve like we did after the OPEC oil crisis in the 1970s, and before Reagan's Curse made us hunger for oil again and feel like our smart bombs and Star Wars programs and insane military spending were the reason the Berlin Wall fell -- instead of the steady march of liberty and the relentless pursuit of freedom by all people all over the world.
Government officials instead took credit for our safety when it was we who assured it. Pundits and preachers exhorted us to be grateful to the rich and powerful for making our life so good when it has always been the gift of the People to those interests which allowed them their wealth and granted them their power. In these essays, we have explored how to know the direction in which our nation is moving without having to listen to those whose honesty is in doubt. We have examined the false doctrines by which the rich and powerful have shifted the balance away from the common weal of the People to the satisfaction of their thirsts which can never be slaked. We have envisioned the coming moment when we must stand together and, once again, clean up the mess left by those who pretend to lead us while actually enslaving themselves to the curse of greed, the calling of imperial ambition and the denial of any credit to the work of the People so as to agrandize themselves.
It is time now to turn away from them, from They3:
They 1: Neoconservatives
They 2: Neopuritans in the Dominionist movement
They 3: The military-industrial complex
It matters not if they are wrong. It only matters that they are not right, and therefore meaningless. The only thing that matters now to each citizen of the United States is what is right to do and say and become, as a nation and as a people. They3 want us to think they are powerful and dangerous. The People have already cast them aside and their endless chattering is starting to get on our nerves. Our eyes have now turned to those we elected, and we expect them to do what's right for America, and soon.
7.And Yeshua/Jesus beheld a man working on the Sabbath, and He said to him, man, if you know what you are doing, you are blessed, for you are not breaking the law in the spirit; but if you don't know, you are accursed and a transgressor of the law.
Nazirene Gospel
Chapter 41
We as a nation are now cursed. We have sinned against our fellow citizens and our fellow human beings. We knew what was right, and turned away at the opportunity. We are lost in the wilderness of endless war which "will not end by signing a treaty on a battleship". We are afraid of our neighbors and not afraid of the leaders who are personally responsible for decisions in our name which should never have been made.
It is time to turn back to the light. It is time to listen to our conscience instead of our anger. It is time to allow ourselves to see clearly the right path that we all know, but have denied. We cannot look to our leaders and Representatives to do this for us. They follow us. We cannot look to our religions for the answers because we knew in our hearts we were turning from the right, so our moral compass did its job -- we just didn't want to listen.
This week the Senate failed to muster the will to even engage the debate on the war in Iraq. Senator Feingold has set the bar which all of them must eventually face. He is patiently and systematically preparing for the tipping point. He is not alone.
The House will take up the issue next week. We know we are looking for our Representatives to reflect the state of no confidence the People have reached long ago. We will know they are faithful to us when they act instead of talk. We will know their worth in the next eighteen months by whether they can muster themselves to achieve at least the first three of these outcomes:
- Filibuster-proof majority
- Veto-proof majority
- Resignation or indictment of Administration political appointees
- Impeachment of political appointees
- Resignation or impeachment of the Vice President
- Resignation or impeachment of the President
How far they will go in our name remains to be seen, but the Republicans are getting hit from all sides. They are trying to find a way to save face, to minimize the damage, to blame the Democrats or the terrorists or someone out there who is doing all this just to embarass them. Yet they still use their pulpit to tell the sick God is punishing them, to tell the poor the Free Market will eventually get around to them and to tell the People they still have all the power and we don't.
The only difference is, we don't believe them any more. Our collective conscience knows our soldiers should not be dying in Iraq. Our collective conscience knows somebody better start creating high-quality jobs. We are even coming close to knowing we need taxes to rise again instead of hiding them in the Lotto and "user fees" and bonds sold to China. We know the current direction of the nation, since 9-11 at least, is not right.
Stoking The Fires Of Hell
The Representatives in both chambers are not yet feeling the full power of our weariness with their dithering and pontificating and silly games. The Scooter Libby trial is proving all of our suspicions right, and the Committees are finally holding Government officials to account. Today the prosecution rested its case and next week the defense will begin. Whatever the fate of this one man, the People have the evidence we need to know the cabal of Cheney are arrogant fools.
Still the conservatives whine "that was so four years ago" as if we should honor the thought that a wrong done a couple of news cycles ago is now meaningless. They claim redemption by forgetting and implore us to go along. The wrath of the People is slow in coming, but unstoppable and terrible in its power. We have taken the measure of these men, and they are mice.
1.And as Yeshua/Jesus was going to Jericho He met a man with a cage full of birds, including some very young doves, which he had caught. And He saw how they were in misery having lost their liberty, and moreover being tormented with hunger and thirst.
2.And He said to the man, What are you doing with these? And the man answered, I go to make my living by selling these birds which I have taken.
3.And Yeshua/Jesus said, What would you think, if another, stronger than you or with greater craft, were to catch you and bind you, or your wife, or your children, and cast you into a prison, in order to sell you into captivity for his own profit, and to make a living?
4.Are not these your fellow creatures only weaker than you? And doesn't the same God our Father-Mother care for them as for you? Let these your little brothers and sisters have their freedom, and see that you don't do this thing any more, but provide honestly for your living."
5.And the man marveled at these words and at His authority, and he let the birds go free. So when the birds came forth they flew to Yeshua/Jesus and stood on his shoulder and sang to Him.
6.And the man inquired further of His doctrine, and he went his way, and learnt the craft of making baskets, and by this craft he earned his bread; and afterwards he broke his cages and his traps and became a disciple of Yeshua/Jesus.
Nazirene Gospel
Chapter 41
They beg us to "focus on the issues before us now", hoping we will not go back to the beginning of the current Big Lie -- the day of September 11, 2001. Within a month of that day, the Big Lie was in place. Within a year, a Democratic Senate was credulous enough to go along with it. If they didn't know it was a lie, they were fools. If they did know, they were accessories to the crime.
The tension between the "conventional wisdom" and common sense is the struggle of our time. The conventional wisdom is based on the perception of what is truth -- on truthiness more than truth. Common sense is based on understanding what is real and what is not and acting accordingly. So powerful has the hunger for ratings become that conventional wisdom drives the MSM more and more each year. Common sense does not leak through as the firewall against lawsuits and criticism of sounding "balanced" is reinforced night after night, pundit by pundit.
To cut through this hazy and lazy way of seeing what is going on around us, we need a sense of what is right so we can ignore everything else. As infosmog engulfs us, we want to emerge with a clear way forward that is right and just and true. We want to be informed citizens, not just consumers of words and images. The more we demand information, the more the various media have to respond to attract us as viewers, listeners and consumers. We have this power, and we need to use it. To do so, we need to know the right path.
Facts, Doctrines & Systems
Alfred Korzybski was a liberal, if not politically than philosophically. He came to the United States after World War I as a recruiter for the Polish military. He stayed to become an advocate for the League Of Nations, then a pariah against the rise of fascism and Nazism. His 1921 book Manhood of Humanity is the work of an idealist still full of hope. His 1933 book Science And Sanity is a passionate but confused screed against the conventional wisdom of his day. But buried in all the words is a cry for common sense and hundreds of techniques to attain it in our own lives. Buried in his brilliant, but dense, prose are simple ideas every citizen can use to slice away the crap and pull out the information in everything being presented to them.
Alfred's methods to pull common sense out of the gloss of conventional wisdom are more relevant in the early 21st century than ever. He is famous for his observation that "the map is not the territory it describes". Whatever we can say a thing is, whatever we say can never be the thing itself. Even when we accurately classify what kind of thing something is, the thing may change tomorrow and what we said yesterday is now wrong.
All of us have too much to think about in the course of living our lives. When the MSM is determined to sell us more stuff, our thoughts are filled with lies, innuendos, emotional appeals and clever phrases while we are watching or listening to the flow of words and images in our media. The Devil is in the details, but if you can ignore all the details but the ones that matter, you can get the Devil by the throat and shake the truth out of the bastard. They3 are the Devil we face right now. When they are in power, they hold back the information at the source as much as they can, and replace information with propaganda with increasingly cunning and powerful methods. They3 are bastards, but they are master bastards.
Alfred advises us to take a look at how information comes to us. We can think of information in three layers:
Facts are statements, the simplest things we can say about anything. Simple, but very tricky. First, facts can be stated which are not true, but we can think they are true because someone said so. Second, facts which were true a minute ago can be false now and true again in an hour. Third, facts can be statements which cannot be true or false until something happens to prove them one way or another (like saying we will reach a state of no confidence on the Spring Equinox of 2007).
Facts often need a context in which to organize and give them meaning. "I weigh too much" can't be sorted into a bin for true or another one for false without a context: "if you weigh more than 200 pounds, you weigh too much". We need a standard, a rule, by which we can sort facts. A doctrine is a set of such rules or standards. Doctrines are so powerful they can seem to explain every case.
Anyone who commits adultery is going to hell. Simple rule, right? Wait a minute. What is adultery? Where is hell? So we have to decide another rule. Those rules lead to other rules. Eventually, we often end up back at the rules we started with. Words define words until we return to the words we started with. Korzybski called these patterns circular definitions.
The problem with doctrines is that they make too much sense. Doctrines cannot be proven not to be true, so we can never decide between two of them. This quandry makes them dangerous to use unless we have to because we have not moved beyond them. "Anyone who doesn't wear Acme Sneakers is not cool." can be a rule. Rules like that are thrown at us from media and other people in such rapidity and in so many ways we try to shut them out, but they end up influencing our thinking. We can catch ourselves looking at someone's sneakers and thinking, "They're not cool" before we even realize it.
A student of Korzybski's, Wendell Johnson, wrote the book _People In Quandries_ about how to treat people who stutter. One of his insights was that people who stutter get to the point where they can't hear normal stutters in other people's speech. I remember coming back from class after discussing this idea and telling my roommate. He looked at me in surprise. He was treated for stuttering as a child and _he didn't realize other people stuttered at all_. I didn't even know my roommate "was a stutterer". He filtered out hearing me stutter. Talk about a fast application of something you just learned in class!
Doctrinal thinking fits facts into a framework, organizing them nice and neat like photos in a scrapbook. But then some nasty thing happens in our lives that doesn't fit and then we have to face ripping the scrapbook apart and rearranging the pictures. If the scrapbook is big enough, we often just toss the latest pictures aside because it is too hard to keep ripping up the scrapbook.
When it comes to our view of the world, the older we get the less we like having to relearn anything. As long as we can just toss new facts aside and not have to rethink a whole series of ideas to fit it in, we will tend to avoid the hassle.
In the previous essays in this series, we looked at such doctrines in depth. We saw how powerful doctrines about America and what we are can be, even if they are false. We saw how much easier it is to dismiss other people and be cruel to them rather than have to change our world view to let them hassle us or teach us anything.
Doctrines are not right or wrong by themselves. We can only know when a doctrine is not right any more, and then we have to be willing to rethink that doctrine -- who has time to pay that price for every little thing we've already learned, often by hard experience?
Thus Ann Coulter can say liberals are godless, and fellow citizens buy her books. Their view of god doesn't have to be rethought (or, in this case, rebelieved). The President can say there are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and, just in case, we allow him to start a war to stop a threat we are made to believe exists because we feel in danger.
But doctrines also wear out and must be replaced. Martin Luther King stood on the steps in Washington D. C. and dared the nation to share his dream. British colonists revolted and decided they would try a new form of government unlike any other the world had known before.
In the crux of choosing whether to undergo the transformation of our own thinking, and the thinking of our nation's character, we are constantly bombarded with a false choice: one way is safer than the other. To fear the rest of the world and dominate them with our military power is a sure thing, we are told over and over. "To embrace the diversity of the world and lead by example is a fool's errand," they whisper to us like the witch to Snow White. "Being a liberal is handing the gun to our enemies and telling them to shoot us."
Now we know the regressives sold the guns to our enemies and are daring them to shoot us. The irony of their evil has become so obvious and pitiful we feel more tired than angry right now. But the longer they continue without justice being served, the more anger will win out.
Systematic Thinking
Korzybski believed the doctrinal mode of thinking was dangerous in a modern society. The greatest danger of doctrines is that they allow two citizens to hold opinions with no way to choose between them as the wise policy of the Government and of the society in which they both live. The circular arguments which ensue between two people, each wrapped snugly in their verbal cocoons, lead to division, violence and all the evils humanity can visit upon itself.
There is a tremendous difference between 'thinking' in verbal terms, and 'contemplating', inwardly silent, on non-verbal levels, and then searching for the proper structure of language to fit the supposedly discovered structure of the silent processes that modern science tries to find. If we 'think' verbally, we act as biased observers and project onto the silent levls the structure of the language we use, and so remain in our rut of old orientations, making keen, unbiased, observations and creative work well-nigh impossible. In contrast, when we 'think' without words, or in pictures...we may discover new aspects and relations on silent levels, and so may produce important theoretical results in the general search for a similarity of structure between the two levels, silent and verbal. Practically all important advances are made that way.
Manhood Of Humanity, 1920
Alfred Korzybski
p. xlix
Alfred looked to mathematics as a source of hope. Mathematics not only relates facts to each other, it allows you to sort facts into true ones and false ones relative to a context which everyone agrees to at the start of the sorting. Logic and mathematics make us contemplate facts which don't fit, forcing the people who agreed to the context to step back and rethink the context itself.
He hoped such habits of thinking, common in mathematics and science, could be taught to everyone so in other areas of our lives we could agree to rethink our assumptions in a similar way. To understand why he wanted this to happen, we need to look at his life in more detail.
War Without Human Scale
Alfred Korzybski was an officer in the Polish army during World War I. Raised in a wealthy family, he was educated at some of Poland's finest schools and then sent to lead men in battle. But World War I was not like the wars before, where battles where won or lost based mainly on men having to struggle with other men face to face. World War I innovated mustard gas, cannons with explosive shells that could be fired from far way (too far to see those being killed) and airplanes. The modern sciences, so full of promise to Alfred's generation, brought mechanized warfare to a new lethality in which human beings were rendered helpless victims -- dying horribly by people miles away.
Alfred came to the United States after the war and wanted to see the League of Nations happen. He thought it could succeed in stopping all wars before the machinery of death became so efficient whole populations could be slaughtered without having to see, touch or feel any part of their agony. Body counts would become a cypher on a spreadsheet instead of real people no longer able to live their lives.
It is the counsel of wisdom to discover the laws of nature, including the laws of human nature, and then live in accordance with them. The opposite is folly.
Manhood Of Humanity, 1920
Alfred Korzybski
p. 5
Alfred had seen that folly up close and personal in the trenchs of World War I. He saw mustard gas creeping down the trenchs like a silent river of ghosts and heard his men screaming and dying under the sickening fog. He came to understand that humankind had reached its adolescence and had to grow up, to achieve "manhood" -- or die from weapons so terrible no one could ever use them or the whole planet would become barren.
Alfred believed our humanity lay in our ability to learn new facts by punching through our paradigms to new ways of seeing the world. He grew tired of politicians and pundits constantly sorting the same old facts over and over and quibbling endlessly over how they should fit together. The distinguishing mark of this ability Alfred saw in every human being is that we can create ideas which have never been known before and pass them on to future generations, who can build upon them and conceive new ideas upon that foundation. He called this ability time-binding. As far as we know, only human being can bind facts together in new ways, discover whole new vistas of facts and accumulate our knowledge in books and other things outside our bodies -- and those things could carry our memes forward in time as long as our civilization lasts.
A farmer must know the natural laws that govern his wheat, or corn, or cow, as otherwise he will not have satisfacotry crops, or the quality and abudnance of milk he desires, whereas the knowledge of these laws enables him to produce the most favorable conditions for his plants and animals, and thereby to gain the desired results.
Humanity must know the natural laws for humans, otherwise humans will not create the conditions and the customs that regulate human activities which will make it possible for them to have the most favorable circumstances for the fullest human development in life; which means the release of the maximum natural-creative energy and expression in mental, moral, material, and spiritual and all the other great fields of human activities, resulting in happiness in life and in work -- collectively and individually -- because the conditions of the earning of a livelihood influence and shape all our mental processes and activities, the quality and the form of human inter-relationships.
Manhood Of Humanity, 1920
Alfred Korzybski
p. 6
When we punch through to a new level of knowing, we achieve a whole new level of "rightness" which could not exist before. Instead of bleeding people to cure them of humours, we can invent vaccines to actually cure diseases. Instead of building more and more weapons no one should ever use, we could solve the problems of poverty, ignorance and hunger which drive people to kill each other. In the end, he hoped, we could eliminate the need for weapons altogether.
Another student of Korzybski, Gregory Bateson, wrote that these products of time-binding take two forms: artifacts and sacraments. Artifacts are what we would leave behind if humanity did destroy itself -- physical things outside ourselves on which we leave the imprint of our souls and minds. Sacraments can only be passed on by shared experience, and would die with mankind if we choose to end the human race altogether.
The Sacrament Of America
America is a sacrament. Artifacts like the Constitution, the flags, the buildings and libraries and roads and mighty machinery of war are not America. The United States of America must be renewed by each generation, or it dies. Sacraments must be passed on by human contact and mutual experience. Artifacts can lay around until other civilizations find them in the dust of our ruins, rendered meaningless because we are no longer there to animate them and make them come alive.
Korzybski became disillusioned with the failure of the League Of Nations. By 1933, his writing is urgent, angry and given to diatribes against the growing threat of fascism and Nazism in his native Europe. His book Science and Sanity, published first in 1933, argues that we have to stop thinking in "the answer is either one thing or another" mode -- doctrinal thinking at its worst ("you are for us or against us"). The tit-for-tat arguments over whose doctines are right only lead to pointless war and waste of human potential. He argued you are either sane or not. He hated the word "insane". Instead, you behave in sane ways or "unsane" ones. Sane ways of behaving lead to solving problems and alleviating the misery of your fellow human beings. Any other way of behaving was simply not sane. It doesn't mean you have a medical condition or should be "treated" -- it means you need to reset your world view.
Similarly, science is not antithetical to anything else. Religion is not the opposite of science. Science is solving problems presented by new facts. If we refuse to solve the problems new facts present to us, or refuse to acknowledge new facts exist, we give up the struggle to be more right about the way things really work than we were before. We end up leaving more and more of those nasty facts out there unexplained or ignored. When those facts are that the planet is warming up faster than it used to, for example, those who dig in to apply science to understanding that fact are working toward knowledge which will be right more often than wrong; true more often than it was possible to be before the new knowledge was available.
We are, each of us, responsible to our fellow human beings and for their welfare. If we decide to remain unsane or if we decide to solve problems unscientifically, we will simply fail that responsibility.
Except for productive human labor, our globe is too small to support the human population now upon it. Humanity must produce or perish.
Manhood Of Humanity, 1920
Alfred Korzybski
p. 7
Pursuing What Is Right
We are either producing artifacts or trash. We are either participating in sacriments or descending into meaninglessness. Liberty is such a sacrament. Tyranny results when liberty cannot be sustained.
Darkness is not the opposite of light, but the absence of it. Cruelty is the absense of justice. Ignorance is the absence of truth. The pursuit of power is all that is left to a person bereft of a sense of what is right to say and do which will further the lives of your fellow man. Of your fellow citizens. Of another member of your community afflicted with a disease who needs dignity more than your sense of salvation.
Sell not virtue to purchase wealth, nor Liberty to purchase power.
Poor Richard's Almanak
(1738)
Benjamin Franklin
The pursuit of truth, justice and right is our mission, as the United States of America. Whatever creed impressed that upon the Founders, we either honor it or deny it. We honor it by assuming life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is the God-given right of every citizen and cannot be usurped by any other citizen -- or the whole of our republican democracy will fail. This understanding is a sacrament, born in the generation who wrote the Declaration Of Independence, ratified the Constitution and passed the Bill Of Rights. The system of ideas they discovered in striving with each other is now our common moral compass. Their doctines are long gone, never to return because they are no longer necessary -- too many facts in their time have been replaced with the facts in ours.
These ideas challenge each succeeding generation to systematically think through what that system of thought means for the facts we face in our time. That puzzle must be solved over and over again or the whole experiment that is America fails. That imperative, not to be the generation that fails, means we have to leave our doctrines in our private lives and systematically solve our common problems in our public lives. This sacrament circumscribes our morality to be humane and tolerant. If we pass this experiment on to future generations unsullied by compromising our liberties, that achievement -- and that achievement alone -- will prove our ethics worthy of emulation in the future. Otherwise, our sense of what is right should die because through it we have failed in the only way that matters to the nation.
Liberty is the path toward the right when we find ourselves in any doubt. Our personal liberties are in doubt right now, and we let it happen. If we accept this burden, this mission, we can once again become free people among peers instead of sheep waiting to be slaughtered. If we hold our leaders to the same standards and laws as those which bind us, instead of forgetting their errors because "we have other problems now", we protect the sacrament that alone can make us safe, render us indivisible in the face of any enemy and empower us to be unstoppable in our march to lead the free nations of the world toward real liberty. It is up to us to force our Representatives and leaders to honor the rule of law without resorting to weapons and without sacrificing our civil rights to "special powers" given undeserved to anyone or to anything in Government, in life or on this planet.
Right now, in this time, we alone are the carriers of this flame and guardians of this truth. Only we can guard this sacrament, given to us by our forebears, generation by generation without interruption. If we are not faithful to the charge they have placed in our hands, the dream which was America shall perish from the earth forevermore.
If we find our faith in liberty again, we will rediscover the simple truth of America. If we contemplate this truth, we will see our fellow citizens without the doctrines of ideology and understand what is just. If we demand justice and settle for no less than the truth from our Government, we will set our nation on the right path again. We will have found within ourselves the American Way.
Only then will our nation, and our common future, be safe again.
See you again in ten days as the countdown to no confidence continues.
The Series
Introduction to the series
T-80: Inflection Points & Catastrophes
Owning the key moments of our time
T-70: False Doctrines
Centralized Authority, Pre-emptive War
T-60: The Powell Doctrines
The Powell Memo, The Powell Doctrine, They3, People7, The Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy (VRWC), Overton hypercubes
T-50: Clean Out The Barn
Next: T-30: Standing Up
Please feel free to use this as a common thread. Pimp your own diaries, links and ideas without shame, because I want to hear from you. Promote the words of others that our fellow citizens need to hear when the point of no confidence is reached. Identify inflection points, realized and gathering, that you see. This power is the power of the Internet, of this online community and of the People. Use it now as more and more citizens need real ideas and real debate. Prepare yourselves for the moment for which many of us have worked decades: a chance to finish the work left undone after the resignation of Nixon.