An American Snapshot

“Government is not reason; it is not eloquence. It is force. And force like fire, is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.” – George Washington

 Elroy WI – According to CNN News, 90 % of Americans do not trust the United States Congress. According to FOX News, only 23 % of Americans are feeling “Confident and proud” while 71 % are asking “Is this the best we can do?”

We are over 16,000,000,000,000 dollars in debt. On January 1^st of the coming year, Obamacare, as the new individual mandate bill the president signed into law during his first term has come to be called, will take effect.

Americans recently learned that the NSA tracks many of their calls, even if it does not listen to them.

The president has assured us “nobody is listening to your phone calls” and has also stated that we cannot have both one hundred percent security and one hundred percent privacy. Benjamin Franklin warned “He that gives up liberty, to attain a little short term security, deserves neither liberty nor security, and will in the end attain neither.”

The IRS, it has been found, is targeting, or was targeting conservative groups. They also, it seems, spent millions of dollars on conferences for their employees.

In the Benghazi hearings we are finding that someone failed to do as they should have, costing us the lives of Americans.

People are losing faith and trust in the government. The government must survive on trust, but when it cannot trust its citizens, and when its citizens cannot trust it, they have to constantly watch each other. Then, we have 1984.

In 1949, four years after World War II ended, George Orwell published a book entitled 1984, a fictional story about a society that is always at war. “Liberty is slavery” “War is peace.” Someone, some great leader, runs it all, as the book coined the phrase “Big brother is watching you.”

The society lives in a state of perpetual war. Total oversight is on all fronts, there is no privacy.

In Orwell’s book, it all ends with the hero, Winston Smith, a onetime dissenter, being re-taught, to think like the opponents, like Big Brother would want him to.

Protests will not last forever; marching in circles with signs will grow tiring. The people, if they are not committed to the long struggle, not of weapons, but of words, if they are not prepared to fight, to struggle for their rights through all channels, in the courtroom, in the press, through leaflets, if they are not willing to stand and shout “I disagree” even when it means jail, then it will not change, because those who have set up the system do not want it to change. It is we who must demand change, and we must demand it now.

 

Through His Strength We Will Conquer,

Andrew C. Abbott