If vigilance dies, can liberty survive?
A president known for his wit had the courage to tell his constituents "Americans too often want the luxury of opinion without the effort of thought." This gentle rebuke was JFK's variation on the theme by Thomas Jefferson that no nation can be "ignorant and free." (Can you imagine a political operative today permitting his principal to speak with such honest candor?)
Two decades earlier the chief executive who led us out of the Great Depression and through anguished years of World War II -- Franklin D. Roosevelt -- called for wisdom and commitment to rebuild our nation so all its citizens could enjoy freedom from fear and want, freedom of speech and religion, thereby honoring the Constitutional mandate to "promote the general welfare."
Securing the four freedoms and promoting the welfare of all our people is hindered today by civic indolence as well as selfish motives and even betrayal by "corrupted or deluded citizens" (see George Washington's Farewell Address). And yet, "If vigilance dies through sloth or fear, how long can liberty survive?"
Living in denial, pretending this country is not being taken over by self-serving minority interests, is tantamount to adopting a state religion of subservient hebetude -- not unlike the Eloi-Morlock horror of H.G. Wells, the "Brave New World" of Aldous Huxley and "1984" of George Orwell.
Thank goodness "Fahrenheit 451" has not yet been totally implemented in our degenerate land. Persistent people can still get access to uncensored writings of those cited above as well as Confucius, Socrates, Gospel ethics, Albert Schweitzer, C.G. Jung, Thorstein Veblen, and other civic humanitarians (don't settle for revisionist "interpretations").
Nobel laureate Bertrand Russell said people "fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth." So we ignore the warnings and fill our heads with media gossip (politics, sex, crime), money games (stock market, America's pastime), electronic toys and wacko entertainment, suggestive of a latter-day Roman Empire. Not Pax Romana but our own namesake era of neo-fascism (see skewed income distribution and uneconomic product mix) with perpetual war and global terror.
Time for mental awakening and moral rearmament?
Robert L. Darcy
Wheaton