In today’s America,
Would we have supported a Revolution?

Do you think that if today’s mood was prevalent 200 years ago, that we would have had a Revolution? Or that we would have written a Declaration of Independence or had the temerity to prepare a Constitution?

I don’t think so.

Chances are Thomas Paine sensing the ennui and disinclination towards any kind of positive active would have never have penned Common Sense or cross the seas to be on the battlefield in Morristown with George Washington.
There would have been no battlefield.

Hamilton would have opted out for a good English banking job. Jefferson would have kept inventing on the plantation.
Adams would have still been a “trouble maker” from the English perspective and might have spent some time in jail for stirring up the good citizens of Boston who would have kept paying the tea tax albeit reluctantly.

Franklin would have kept tickling our minds with his Almanac and be fortunate not to get executed by his experiments with lightening. All the French mademoiselles would have been deprived.

Washington would have probably gotten another commission from the Brits and we would have simply emerged today as simply a good dominion or colony.

Maybe, in the end, that wouldn’t have been so bad because it is far worse to be a democracy and then fail to support it. It seems that nobody ever told the American people that democracy is something that needs to be protected. It is not on “automatic pilot.”

Americans don’t seem to understand that democracy isn’t permanently guaranteed; that the values and guarantees implicit in our documents must be taught to all children and that we, in general, must make the necessary commitment to preserving the ideas essential to democracy if it is to work in perpetuity; otherwise, as French philosophers from Montaigne to deToqueville understood, it could be easily perverted into more radicalized forms of government, like despotism/fascism, without that transition being realized or the consequences fully understood.

A cautionary note for those who too readily accept the argument that the loss of our freedoms is essential if we are to combat terrorism—tactics that employ fear and intimidation remain redolent of Fascist regimes in the late thirties….

Les Aaron

www.lesaaron.blogspot.com


.