I have friends who will just about fall out when they see that I am quoting a Republican, but wisdom’s where you find it.
I see in the future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed. I feel at this moment more anxiety for the safety of my country than ever before, even in the midst of the war.”
- Abraham Lincoln
Nov. 21, 1864 (letter to Col. William F. Elkins)
Look at the party of Lincoln and see whose hands it sits in now- the hands of big business. The current Republicans cry out for unfettered individual freedom and for self-determination, yet that kind of freedom only belongs to those who have the money to pay for it and to make their own rules. The rest of us, the majority of us, will never know true freedom. As long as we work for others for wages, as long as we swallow, accept and pursue the vision of ideal life and happiness that they ve created for us, as long as we sublimate who we are and what matters to fit into someone else’s definition of success, we can never be free.
By kowtowing to big industry, corporate America, the gods of commerce, and the rule of capitalism, the Republicans will never be able to give the American people freedom. I’m not saying the Democrats have it all right either, but at least they are not running around claiming they have cornered the market on freedom.
I think what the Republicans and the Conservatives of this country fear most right now is not a lack of freedom, but equality. They are afraid that if they cannot keep the proceeds of commerce (their wealth) or if others are given an equal share, that they will lose their worth. And not just financial worth.
At the end of the day, we are all human beings and therefore are all equal. The Declaration of Independence recognizes equality as a self-evident truth; it even lists ‘all men are created equal’ first. Money and commerce establishes a hierarchy of man and his relative worth by his accumulation of wealth (net WORTH, anyone?); this is not in the interest of equality. In promoting money (a manmade and artificial concept) and commerce, the Republicans are working against one of the very fundamental values the Founding Fathers used to establish this nation. This is in opposition to their claim of being the party that best represents and respects the ideals of the Founding Fathers.
The inequality created by an artificial definition of worth is just like the aristocratic class system the Fathers revolted against. I believe modern Republicans are right in one respect; we do need to get back in touch with the values that founded this country. We all need to look in the mirror, and inside ourselves, and find a new definition of worth- one that does not rely on the proceeds of commerce. Maybe then, this nation won t be so’¦catawampus.
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