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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lane3 who wrote (8209)	12/31/2005 2:34:26 PM
From: Lane3	Respond to of 541374

"Whenever there is a crisis. Democracy is a wonderful thing. Unlike monarchies and dictatorships it has this wonderfully peaceful method of redirecting the course of a nation called voting. However, it does have some flaws. The founding fathers recognized those flaws and tried to correct for them in the constitution and bill of rights. But the founding fathers were not gods and they could not completely remove some of the major flaws of the system or alter human nature. Namely, they couldn't change humanity's predisposition toward mass panic during a crisis and a herd mentality. It just seems that every time anything bad happens people rush to toss away reason and embrace the stampede. Since the version of history taught in public schools is plain vanilla, no one ever learns it was a bad idea last time we did it. As I read the daily news I think of the great crisis, movements and the resulting stampedes of yesteryear: Consider the sinking of the "harmless" passenger ship the Lusitania . The incident played a role in the United States' entry into World War I. Even thou it was later shown to be caring munitions for the allies. If ever there was a war we had no business in it was WWI. Or consider the XVIIIth amendment. What a disaster. In a righteous attempt to exorcise the demon rum we created organized crime, the drive by shooting and corrupted law enforcement to a level unseen until the “war on drugs”. The great depression caused a veritable cascade of rash behavior, as humanity embraced/attacked fascism, communism and socialism. FDR used the depression to his advantage, but Huey Long wasn't far behind. If you enjoyed the welfare state that FDR built you would have really loved what Mr. Long had in mind. It's hard to decide if Long was a fascist or a communist, but I do believe that a bullet changed American history. "Every Man a King" was his slogan and there were indications that the lingering wave of despair from the great depression was going to wash over FDR, and install Huey. Of course FDR went on to make Huey look like an old softy. After Pearl Harbor he locked over 100,000 American citizens up in internment camps. Then there is the Second Gulf of Tonkin incident. The famous event that allowed Secretary McNamara to acquire the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, that facilitated increased U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. Even thought the reports of the first incident were a distortion of reality, and the second incident a complete fabrication. And I can't leave out my favorite act of mass insanity, the Spanish American War. A badly designed warship blows itself up, so we attack Spain. Remember the Maine! All this doesn't mean that the combined force of our collective will is always a bad thing. It was that same irrational herd mentality that created this country. The founding fathers were men of means, who risked lives and property to secure the blessings of liberty. They didn't have to do any of that, they were very financially well off. It would have been much simpler and safer to just pay the English taxes. Courage doesn't have to mean joining the military. Sometimes it just means refusing to live in fear of 19 men in stolen commercial airliners. It means not subverting hard won liberty to protect ourselves from a couple of dozen men. We are a nation of almost 300 million people; on September 11th we lost about 3000 at the hands of 19. As traumatic an event as that was, that's not a lot of people. The constitution and bill of rights are special. They are what has made this country what it is today. To undermine them for the sake of expedience would chance the character of the country. How about we have a little courage of our own? Let's think about the long term consequences of our decisions, let's learn from the past! Posted by BobJYoung at December 31, 2005" centristcoalition.com