Posted on 05/02/2009 10:22:18 AM PDT by quesney
While reading the following news story:
http://uk.reuters.com/article/motoringAutoNews/idUKTRE5406CF20090501
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I was reminded two very important quotes from John Adams about the American Revolution:
* As to the history of the revolution, my ideas may be peculiar, perhaps singular. What do we mean by the Revolution? The war? That was no part of the revolution; it was only an effect and consequence of it. The revolution was in the minds of the people, and this was effected from 1760 - 1775, in the course of fifteen years, before a drop of blood was shed at Lexington. o Letter to Thomas Jefferson (1815-08-24), The Works of John Adams
What do we mean by the American Revolution? Do we mean the American war? The Revolution was effected before the war commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people; a change in their religious sentiments, of their duties and obligations... This radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments, and affections of the people was the real American Revolution. * Letter to H. Niles (1818-02-13)
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In other words, years before the American Revolution, there had been a revolution in people's minds about the way things were and the way things should be.
Forget the disputes over just how real are Obama's high poll numbers. This is beyond Obama, or even his current followers.
Whether we realize it or not, the US went through another mental revolution of thought over the past few decades -- maybe beginning as far back as the anti-war protests of the 1960s, maybe to Roosevelt's New Deal, maybe to Lincoln forcing a more centralized Union...whatever.
This revolution of thought has slowly eroded the entire mental foundation of the country's founding principles.
The U.S., as it was and as many of us here still think of it, is already gone. Dead. A number of us have not fully caught up to this emerging reality.
Obama, and Bush before him, are only making that obvious. Steele, Arlen Spectre, the feckless GOP, all the rest -- it's all part of bigger picture already drawn and entrenched, maybe even before many of us were born.
Many of us are holding onto a mental artifact that is gone or never existed in the minds of our "fellow Americans." That remains true no matter what happens to Obama, long after he's gone.
Does that mean we give up? No. But that if you're making a personal decision not to give up, you have to start thinking more seriously about follow-up to those Tea Parties and perhaps to secession.
The U.S. is, beyond everything else, an idea. When our "fellow Americans" no longer share the basic elements of that idea -- of even basic standards of mutual respect, logic, reason, civil discourse, respect for others as equals -- our "fellow Americans" are no longer our "fellow Americans."
Plan accordingly.
The Revolution Was (that is, it happened under FDR already): http://mises.org/story/2726
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The U.S. isn’t dead - it’s ‘under construction’. Geographic balkanization with a central minimal authority seems to be the next big thing. It’s just the delicate matter of how and not why that needs to be addressed.
“The U.S. isn’t dead - it’s ‘under construction’. Geographic balkanization with a central minimal authority seems to be the next big thing. It’s just the delicate matter of how and not why that needs to be addressed.”
Agree. That’s the best-case scenario at this point — a sharp shift to federalism...I mean to the Swiss-canton extreme.
I’m starting to think any other scenario will mean either violence or oppression.
It’s just pinin’
>about follow-up to those Tea Parties and perhaps to secession.
Reporting for duty.
Armed and ready...
The reality that no democracy has ever been democratic..
It always was and is an Oligarchy..
There was a time when America was a republic.. and long gone almost forgotten..
But myth of America being a republic still persists..
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Democracy is the road to socialism. -Karl Marx
Democracy is indispensable to socialism. The goal of socialism is communism. -V.I. Lenin
The meaning of peace is the absence of opposition to socialism .-Karl Marx
I just met the Democrat who wants to run against Bennett for the senate seat in Utah. Met him in my favorite coffee shop just an hour ago. When he asked me for my vote I told him, “No, thanks.” . . . politeness I learned from my mother. I’ve just spent the last hour thinking of all the other things I could have said.
Seems like a good place to meet politicians; I spoke with Jason Chaffetz here just two weeks ago, a good conservative Republican representative from Utah.
Agreed.
This is 100% spot-on. Prepare to be called a traitor or worse, though, because you actually get it - America is not a location, it's an idea, a concept that can expand geographically. To many FReepers, though, pledge allegiance and swear fealty to a piece of land rather than a governing set of principles and foundational beliefs that transcend dirt.
I believe the current geographical region called the US will completely collapse before it regains its senses. Hopefully enough small sparks of that once brightly burning fire will continue to flourish and spread on other continents so that the idea can continue.
I agree and disagree. I think people were moving towards bigger government, accepting it in a way that would have been unthinkable probably even 50 years ago, but at the same time, I think Obama represents a radical departure and the problem is that people haven’t quite realized how radical yet.
Obama is quite obviously a Communist; he and the people behind him, such as Ayers and Axelrod, go way beyond European style socialism and quite simply want a society and an economy, including the means of production, controlled 100% by the “government,” that is, by them. He is busy redistributing not only income but capital, parcelling it out to government controlled “worker” organizations (Chrysler/UAW), and is rapidly building a system where established US law will be meaningless in fact.
Americans had already let the government get much too intrusive, all for their own good, of course, but that’s because we’ve had years and years of state-run education run and staffed by dim-bulb bureaucrats whose idea of the best thing that could happen to anybody would be to get a government job. Then the government was supposed to protect people from real life, everything from hurricanes (remember how Bush was BLAMED for Katrina?) to the effects of one’s own laziness.
It was very easy for Barry and the gang, hard-core Marxists all, to present themselves as following in the grand new tradition of a government that “cares” and simply use that as a vehicle for something much more radical. As for whether or not it’s too late, I don’t know. I suspect it may be.
America — a great idea, didn’t last.
“I agree and disagree. I think people were moving towards bigger government, accepting it in a way that would have been unthinkable probably even 50 years ago, but at the same time, I think Obama represents a radical departure and the problem is that people haven’t quite realized how radical yet.”
I fundamentally disagree. I don’t think Obama is a radical departure from the course we have clearly been on — through Democratic and Republican administrations — for at least 30 years.
Even Reagan didn’t slow it. Obama is looking more like the period at the end of a long sentence.
Sorry, I meant — even Reagan couldn’t **reverse** this. He may have tried, mightily, to slow it, but he didn’t reverse it. We have ceded more and more of our freedoms for at least three decades, with more and more Americans taking this for granted as the way things should be. Obama is only making the implicit explicit.
If 100 days under Obama was enough to destroy America, it must have been already basically dead. I don’t know that is so.
Now, if Obama is re-elected to a second term...
That’s my point exactly, Dean.
Obama couldn’t have made it in and gone as far as he had if the US (as we’ve known it) weren’t already dead.
If it were already dead FR would be banned and Rush and the lot of us would be in prison.
I’m fed up with these ‘America is dead’ posts. And I’m highly suspicious of them. If I’m not dead, then America is not dead. Quit being Debbie Downer.
Walk away, Renee, it’s dead!
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