This ...]]> Well, I’m back from Cancun.  Didn’t even tell anyone I was leaving.  It makes the wait easier.  But I’m back now, and I’ll be posting about that whole experience soon enough.  But for now, I just wanted to bring to your attention a commentary I read on CNN today by Glenn Beck.  If you’ve never heard his radio program or seen his show, I’d recommend it.  He occasionally comes off sounding like a dufus, but hey… you don’t mind cuz you’re reading this site still.

This commentary expresses what I feel so well that I see no point in trying to reiterate it.  I just wish I would’ve known of the quote from George Washington beforehand.  How did we lose this kind of awesome power of speaking?

“The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of public liberty.”

What is the purpose of government?  Or perhaps I should ask what did our country’s founding fathers believe the purpose of government was, and is it still relevant?

Remembering my high school social studies classes, I think a safe answer is “To protect the rights of its people.”  Notice the absence of “and provide for its people too.”  And in a free country I can’t see how protecting individual rights could ever become irrelevant.

So why not provide for its people too?

You have certain inalienable rights.  Is it your right to have a home?  Is it your right to be rich?  Is it your right to have the government kiss-it-better when you’re the one that ran your company into the ground?  It is not the government’s business doing any of that, and frankly I’d be scared if it was.  Because where would it end?  Government living quarters.  Official food and clothes.  The Peoples’ Money.  Suspicion.  Segregation.  Restricted books.  Curfews.  Detention centers.

Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  That was the idea.  That you would not be prevented from doing what you need to make yourself happy.  It does not mean it should be given if things didn’t quite work out for you.

Suggested viewing:  V for Vendetta, 1984

Suggested reading: 1984 by George Orwell, The End of America by Naomi Wolf, Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood, Apocalypse 2012 by Lawrence E. Joseph