What a free country looks like
posted by Peter Attwood at 8/09/2010 02:31:00 AM
Monday, August 09, 2010
About Me
- Name: Peter Attwood
- Location: Chino, California, United States
In "The Glad River" Will D. Campbell wrote about a guy in Louisiana who wouldn't get baptized because he couldn't find a Baptist in Louisiana to do it. I'm looking for Christians in the USA (Acts 11:26).
Previous Posts
- Hiroshima, Nagasaki - and the wussiness of America...
- Instructive new kitten
- How the other side lives
- What we lose when we win - Rabbi Shmuley Boteach
- Winning hearts and minds
- Anguish of the Age - Robert Jensen
- Independence Day
- Fourth Sermon to Chino Valley school board ( 6/17/...
- Roger Waters - "We Shall Overcome"
- Third sermon to Chino Valley school board (6/4/2010)
7 Comments:
May Iceland teach all of us
Hello Peter,
I am living in Germany. I think that it was about four years ago we were corresponding with each other. I think that it must have been in 2006 because that is when I started writing comments on the Information Clearinghouse web site. It might have been sooner though. I can not say for sure that our virtual paths crossed in 2006 but that is the most likely time. Anyways you sent me some literature in the mail. I want you to know that I read all of it.
I made many notations on it and it was my intention to to write back with all of those notations but as opposing US imperialism became more important and I kept delaying my response and after awhile it just did not seem so important anymore. Years passed and many things happened in the mean time.
What I wrote then has in some cases been superceded by new knowledge and expieriences.
A quick way to summarize it would be to say that I have move from the passionate atheist column to the agnositic Unitarian Universalist Buddhist Communist Libertarian (true)Conservative Sufi who especially likes Quakers, Mennonites, and Bahais column.
But reporting on that change is not the primary purpose of this correspondence. The primary purpose is to ask it you have any type of a phamphlete already made that I could pay you to send to the Lutheran Churches in Peyton Arizona.
My own skills with using the Bible as weapon against injustice have atrophied to a point of uselessness.
Curt
I would like to expand on the idea of what a free country looks like.
234 years ago our nation began as a collection of misfits, in the eyes of the rulers of the rest of the world anyways, who waged an illegal rebellion based on a concept of human rights, despite the fact that a large part of the leadership of this rebellion owned men who were slaves by birth not as a result of a crime that they had committed.
At the close of that rebellion those rebel leaders were faced with the decision of whether or not to honor the spirit in which the rebellion had been waged and free their slaves or reinterpret the purpose of the struggle.
The greed of the of the slaveholders proved greater than their commitment to justice.
Now 234 years later mankind faces a new choice not so unlike the one faced two centuries earlier. Our new slaves could be said to be machines. I think that it is more accurate to say that they are fossil fuels. How can a machine be a slave you ask? I do not mean that it is a slave in the sense that it is being held against its will and be mistreated. I mean that fossil fuels are doing work for us allowing us a life of leisure and creating an EXTERNALITY that is harming other people with out their consent and clearly with out being compensated for the harm done to them.
Of course global warming harms the planet so it harms all of us but there are those of us who get a huge short-medium term benefit from fossil fuels and those who get no benefit what so ever.
The knowledge of how to live without fossil fuels in being assembled as we speak. I just saw a BBC special on Permaculture as a low energy way to replace high energy needs agriculture. Traditional Cities are a way to greatly reduce the need for high energy transportation systems.
Will human leaders act any more wisely than they did 234 years ago.
I think one would have to be a complete fool to say that they would.........unless...........
they had the real threat of having an Axe blade planted between their shoulder blades unless they transformed the society to benefit mankind. Yet in order to make that threat a reality there would have to be leaders that could mobilize a credible threat of death or a loss of power. What are the chances that such leaders could arise. The leaders after all would not have the positions that they do if they were not very good at manipulating the masses.
So the chances of a rebellion to frighten the rulers looks very slim indeed. Why it would take an act of God or of the Buddhas to give such a movement even a slim chance at success. Yet the Gods or the Buddhas seem more eager to see us humans fail than they do to see us succeed.
Is it possible that our failure to learn from our failures is some part of a grand design? Is it possible that this whole space time dimension is just a training exercise so that in another life we can be sent to a place where the lives that we are trying to save are real and not just make believe?
I understand that is kind of a fusion of different traditions.
Who would care to break them apart?
Curt
Yes something is wrong. I am the one trying to rewrite history. There is a darn good reason that almost no slaves were released as a result of the American War of Independence. Those who were fighting Enlgand just used talk of ineddible rights as an excuse to white wash history.
I often like to push something out of my mind. I do not like to talk about it because it destroys a narrative. A story that once upon a time there was a group men for whom ethics really mattered and that they were actually prepared to take substantial risks and make sustantial sacrifices in order to create a more just order in the land in which they live. This is a narrative that I have been telling so that someone who reads it might be motivated to follow this example. The thing is it is an example that never really exsisted.
The reality is that it is hard to know how many men fought at Bunker Hill and at Trenton and at Yorktown because they believed in the Rights of Man but we can be sure that the number was extremely extremely small. No the vast majority of men fought becasue they beleived that they or at least their children would be much better off with out the English because then they would not be bound by the treaties that the English had made with the native Americans, or if not that they had other reasons to think that the English were doing something that disadvanteged them economically and they wanted these rules out of the way reguardless of whether or not they served a greater good.
I hope that Russel Means and Dennis Banks and Clyde Bellecourt can forgive me for the way that I have basturdized US history. I thought that I had a pretty good reason at the time to do it. Maybe if it did some short term good it will have been worth the possible long term damage.
Curt
I do not have any idea what type of people visit this site. I want to throw out a possible program that I think that real conservatives like Patrick Buchannon and libertarians and liberals could unite behind. It would be a first step towards establshing a free country. I of course have other ideas but those could wait for later in order to build a coalition that could dismantle the criminal ruling power structure. Here is my list,
1. Bring the troops home now.
2. Abolish the Federal Reserve.
3. Enact campaign finance reform.
4. Term Limits for the Congress.
5. Military patrols the borders.
6. At least a 25 cent a gallon increase in the gasoline tax per year each year for 20 years at least.
Is that a balanced program?
Would it be a first step towards reestablishing a republic?
Curt
of course
I think that a free country would also hold it officials who launched a war of aggression accountable and bring them to trial. I wrote about that recently but either I do not remember where or it was removed.
In that post I asked the question, what will happen if no one makes and attempt to hold people (especially the Generals) accountable for what they have done? What will happen if some one does try to hold them accountable? One thing I did not say is that we can not predict the future but we can make an attempt to predict likely consequences of our actions.
I came to a point today in which I said to myself, if no one does anything we will not lose the trust of the world because the world never trusted the US in the first place. Not only does the world not trust the US but the leaders of every country distrust the leaders of pretty much every other country anyways.
So I guess that is not a good reason to do something that could be the next step in a cycle of escalating violence which could culminate in a civil war.
But are there 20 other good reasons to do so or only 10?
PRUSSIAN VIRTUES:
There is a list of them at Wiki.
It was once said that such a list is good for running a concentration camp.
I challenge (dare) anyone to make their own comments on this list.
Curt (Karl)
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