It is counted as the first shot of the American Revolutionary War, even though there'd been other shooting; our Revolution was the end point of a slow boil, not a bolt from the blue. It was a shot across the bow of rule-by-decree. It was a shot to the heart of kings and aristocrats, but even more so, it marked resistance to top-down, autocratic government, where elites made up the rules as they went and the masses were expected to obey.
Is any of that sounding familiar? We've got a President in the White House right now who has signed far fewer bills into law than any other President this far into his term -- and has already issued at least 130 Executive Orders, within spitting distance of the 162 his predecessor managed in four years.
250 years ago, forty-nine Americans died fighting for liberty, for a responsive, representative government and individual freedoms that were then little more than the bare outline of a dream. 250 years later, a significant proportion of Americans appear willing to sleepwalk back into a world where the government's men can imprison anyone on mere suspicion and what we might watch, say, read or write is policed to hew to the official government line -- and not by a mere scolding.
As the dream of America's Federal government took shape, Benjamin Franklin is purported to have described it as, "A Republic, if you can keep it."
Can we? Will we?
Update
5 months ago
1 comment:
Unfortunately, a majority of the American voting public has built up a pretty good stock of Cope about the current Admin. Wreckers from the Swamp, Blame the Previous Admin, Fake News, Yeahbut Harris, Look at These Goofy Libs, 4D Chess- all these things will take a while for reality to burn away.
And sadly, there's not much anyone can realistically do until a majority of the people come to that moment of clarity.
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