"
"Our rulers will become corrupt, our people careless. A single zealot may commence persecutor, and better men be his victims. It can never be too often repeated, that the time for fixing every essential right on a legal basis is while our rulers are honest, and ourselves united. From the conclusion of this war we shall be going downhill. It will not then be necessary to resort every moment to the people for support. They will be forgotten, therefore, and their rights disregarded. They will forget themselves, but in the sole faculty of making money, and will never think of uniting to effect a due respect for their rights. The shackles, therefore, which shall not be knocked off at the conclusion of this war, will remain on us long, will be made heavier and heavier, till our rights shall revive or expire in a convulsion."
So wrote Thomas Jefferson in a prescient and pessimistic moment. He was thinking specifically about religious tyranny in his "Notes on the State of Virginia," but as a rough summation of what we now face as a nation it is quite appropriate.
Anti-democratic zealotry is alive and flourishing in the United States at the start of the 21st century. Our punitive Puritan past is returning with a vengeance as the number of public persecutors multiplies rapidly, the foremost being the Bush administration. A large part of the current heartlessness we are now experiencing is the use of cliched language among politicians, journalists and citizens.
The political labels "left" and "right" imply some kind of political scale, with the middle or "mainstream" being the proper balance; this makes it easy for some to marginalize the most humane and democratic ideas as coming from the "extreme left."
It would be wise for all of us to stop using these misguided directions. Similarly, the terms "conservative" and "liberal" now serve as little more than abstract accusations. A more accurate political, and moral, division is between the poetic-hearted and the hard-hearted. This divide at least recognizes that the heart is held in common, and no heart, we poetic-hearted believe, is beyond the reach of empathy and poetry.
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http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0311-27.htmBeautiful!
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