America today is facing a crisis of liberty perhaps more profound than even that faced in the Revolutionary and Civil wars. On one hand is the continuing militarization of civilian police forces and the steady erosion of civil liberties embodied by the Patriot Act, the Military Cooperation with Law Enforcement Act, and others, authorizing and promoting the sale of surplus military hardware to civilian police departments nationwide – the vast majority of which is being used, not to combat terror, but rather in enforcing the over-thirty-year-old and increasingly futile War on Drugs.
On the other hand is the reactionary resurgence of the religious right, evident in the near-universal denial of evolution by Republican primary contenders, and the sweeping challenges being mounted in states across the country against the reproductive rights of women legally guaranteed by Roe vs. Wade, with such campaigns as Mississippi’s new “personhood” initiative, which, if passed into law, could have such far-reaching and perverse effects as banning the use of contraceptive pills and in-vitro fertilization, or counting blastocysts as legal persons when deciding voting districts.
Despite the distorted history currently in vogue among many Tea Party types, and the claims they would like us so desperately to believe regarding the Founding Fathers of our nation, the truth, clearly evidenced in the Founders’ own writings and correspondence, is that they would undoubtedly be sickened by the direction the country is currently headed.
These men were adherents to and products of the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason, a time in the late eighteenth century when the ideas of universal liberty and equality first began to be widely disseminated by such thinkers as John Locke and David Hume in England, and Rousseau, Diderot, and Holbach in France. You know, those people who gave us the Statue of Liberty?
What’s crucial to understand – and the inescapable conclusion and assertions you’ll find if you bother to read their writings firsthand – is that political liberty is both impossible and meaningless without freedom of conscience and freedom of thought. Both principles are derived from and grounded in the factual reality and inviolable laws of Nature itself. This was these Enlightenment thinkers’ entire basis for concluding the inherent rights of mankind enshrined in our core principles, and the moral example we wish to shine upon the world.
The men who founded our country had no intention of setting up any kind of Christian theocracy of the kind which Michelle Bachmann and her crowd would drool over – quite the opposite, in fact. It’s telling that the words “Jesus” and “God” appear nowhere in the Constitution – the founding document of our country and the law of the land to this day. The men who conceived of and set up the original institutions of our nation were largely deists, believing only in the vague notion of some far-off creator god, unaware of and indifferent to our lives and our affairs. They said as much themselves.
Jefferson stated, “And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter,“ and he strongly advocated that “the ‘wall of separation between church and state’ is absolutely essential in a free society.” John Adams wrote, “The divinity of Jesus is made a convenient cover for absurdity. Nowhere in the Gospels do we find a precept for Creeds, Confessions, Oaths, Doctrines, and whole cartloads of other foolish trumpery that we find in Christianity.”
Nor did our founders have any tolerance for the excuses proffered in the name of the War on Terror to justify restrictions on our fundamental rights. As Benjamin Franklin famously admonished, “Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”
Everything these men stood for, everything they fought for and believed in is being imperiled by this radical, Orwellian shift to the right, in this ongoing assault against our civil liberties, in the increasing militarization of everyday life.
This great experiment in democracy, in government of the people, by the people, for the people, is in grave danger of going the way of the Roman Empire if we as freedom-loving citizens do not act to preserve it.
Speak up. Write, demonstrate. Learn your true history; exercise your power at the voting booth.
Our future and the freedom of our children depend on it.
Colby Hess is an avid photographer, a concerned citizen, an active writer, and free-thought activist. Colby is currently writing a book about science, philosophy, and freethought.
Paul Repstock
October 2, 2011 at 11:44 pm
Mr. Hess’s closing reference to the Roman Empire, adds a further somber note when we consider that Caeser’s Army has not yet crossed the Rubicon, coming home. The bottom may yet be far off.
Ann Tares
October 2, 2011 at 12:18 pm
Thanks for standing up for the true “founding fathers” of American democracy. After the War for Independence, they found themselves under attack by the Order of the Cincinatti, a group of military officers, some Continental Congress leaders who believed the 13 new nation states (each independent nations until 1787) should have an aristocracy based on inheritance through the first born son. Every other civilized nation in the world had an aristocracy. A monarch was not far behind.
George Washington joined the Order because it stood for peace – named after the Roman brothers and generals who turned their swords into ploughshares after a successful war. Washington might not have wanted to become a king, but, if the Cincinatti had gained the power they thought was needed to save Americans from the “mob-o-cracy”, he might have acquiesed. The Cincinnati wanted to divide up “Indian Country” into fiefdoms given to the Cincinatti and import poor “Hessian” (German) peasants to work the land and build their wealth. Instead, Benjamin Franklin, through his “Northwest Ordinance,” won the right of the poorest of the poor to compete to swarm the land of the first Americans and to stake claims on any land they could get to first. The Cincinatti did not win directly, but that elitist side of America is also part of America and in 1787 was able to set up an electoral “college” that diluted the votes of the majority for US president.
Our rule-by-elite advocates resurfaced many times out of our greed and/or fear – from the private armies of the robber barons in the late 1800s and early 1900s to the government rendition of Maher Arar and thousands of other innocents captured or sold and sent into the prisons of Kandahar, Bagram, Guantanamo and the black sites of US “allies.” Recently decision-makers in the U.S. corporate world won a great victory when the Supreme Court ruled that corporations share some of our democratic human rights. As a street poster said recently, “I will not believe corporations are people until Texas executes one of them.”Because even the sometimes mistaken vote of the majority is probably better than rule by an autocracy we cannot vote out, some of us still trust the will of the people… despite the past will of the people to destroy any Native American fighting to stay on their land and despite the current will of the Tea Party people who forget the last two words of the 1773 slogan, “No Taxation Without Representation.” The people in the streets of Wisconsin and in the streets of the Arab world give us hope. Even if the challenge of re-organizing fair voting systems in the US and creating them in the Middle East gives the autocrats temporary control.
Eric
October 1, 2011 at 10:37 pm
Well done Mr Hess. Exquisite! I am personally adding you to my watch list, as are many others. The ability to think for ones self is a lost art, and a skill destined to be valued in this increaseingly radical future. EWR
Maher Arar
October 1, 2011 at 5:59 pm
Good piece. I wonder how many americans share your point of view
Brandt Hardin
October 1, 2011 at 10:55 am
Under the guise of fighting terrorism, the Patriot Act was adopted WITHOUT public approval or vote just weeks at 9/11. These unconstitutional laws should be abolished seeing as they violate human rights and due process not to mention the mere 3 criminal charges a year attributed to this act. The laws are simply means to spy on our own citizens and to detain and torture dissidents without trial or a right to council. You can read much more about living in this Orwellian society of fear and see my artist’s response to these measures on my artist’s blog at http://dregstudiosart.blogspot.com/2011/09/living-in-society-of-fear-ten-years.html
Brittany Shandell
October 1, 2011 at 1:56 am
EXTREMELY well written, Mr. Hess. So very glad that someone with such obvious passion and knowledge; spoke up, wrote, and demonstrated his ideas, morals, concerns and constructive criticism.
In what you voiced in your article, it shows how very important ‘learning your true history’ really is. I think one of the problems that i’ve witnessed most, is in trying to open the minds of others that are either brainwashed or just so set in their ways and actually quite fearful of change in itself- that they close up immediately because they’re either afraid it will make too much sense and they realize that their whole life has been based on a lie and are scared and confused -or- they are very angry that someone would say such absurd accusations in their mind and take it as a hit against themselve, very personally. Seems to happen more times than not.
I guess the old saying of not talking politics or religion seems to hold quite true. I think what might really help, is if more people took even the slightest bit more interest in actually reading up a little more than just scratching the surface and digging a little deeper than just headlines. Because we all know that ‘knowledge is power’, and in subjects as important as what Mr. Hess brought up…amongst many others that I know we ALL feel and in reality probably have significant weight in our minds and we just never put into writing. Take what he has said and let it inspire you the way it has me, and READ, LEARN, LISTEN, and SHARE YOUR ‘WELL READ’ OPINION! I will be awaiting your first book, Colby – good luck
Speak up. Write, demonstrate. Learn your true history; exercise your power at the voting booth.