Independence Day

Independence Day, 2006. Hubby and I are spending it by eating picnic food (I'm making barbeque pork, deviled eggs, beans, chips and blackberry cobbler--got some hand-picked blackberries from my father-in-law on Sunday) and watching the World Cup. We are avoiding any programming which may include any video of the idiot Bush. So, this year, as I have the past six years, I won't be watching "A Capital Fourth" because I won't risk it. Later, we may tune in to whichever station is broadcasting the Boston Pops extravaganza. We will watch fireworks on television, and listen to the morons across the hall set off their stupid firecrackers outside.

I cannot wait until we move.

Anyway, Independence Day.

I have often wondered over the last six years, what the Founding Fathers would think about everything that has been going on in Washington. Would they start another revolution? My hunch is they would. Let's let them speak in their own words, shall we?

"It is weakness rather than wickedness which renders men unfit to be trusted with unlimited power." -- John Adams, 1788

"The issue today is the same as it has been throughout all history, whether man shall be allowed to govern himself or be ruled by a small elite." -- Thomas Jefferson

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." -- Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania (1759)

"It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people's minds." -- Samuel Adams

"Free government is founded in jealousy, not confidence. It is jealousy and not confidence which prescribes limited constitutions, to bind those we are obliged to trust with power.... In questions of power, then, let no more be heard of confidence in men, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution." -- Thomas Jefferson, 1799

"The battle, sir, is not to the strong alone; it is to the vigilant, the active, the brave." -- Patrick Henry

"A nation which can prefer disgrace to danger is prepared for a master, and deserves one!" -- Alexander Hamilton

"A Bill of Rights is what the people are entitled to against every government on Earth... and what no just government should refuse." -- Thomas Jefferson in a Letter to James Madison, Paris, Dec. 20, 1787

"A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or, perhaps both." -- James Madison

"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. ... God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion; what country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms." -- Thomas Jefferson

"I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of freedoms of the people by gradual and silent encroachment of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations." -- James Madison

These may not be "Founding Fathers" but they are quotations I feel are appropriate to the spirit of the day.


"The greatest tyrannies are always perpetrated in the name of the noblest causes." -- Thomas Paine

"...There is no nation on earth powerful enough to accomplish our overthrow. ... Our destruction, should it come at all, will be from another quarter. From the inattention of the people to the concerns of their government, from their carelessness and negligence, I must confess that I do apprehend some danger. I fear that they may place too implicit a confidence in their public servants, and fail properly to scrutinize their conduct; that in this way they may be made the dupes of designing men, and become the instruments of their own undoing." -- Daniel Webster, June 1, 1837

"A people may prefer a free government, but if, from indolence, or carelessness, or cowardice, or want of public spirit, they are unequal to the exertions necessary for preserving it; if they will not fight for it when it is directly attacked; if they can be deluded by the artifices used to cheat them out of it; if by momentary discouragement, or temporary panic, or a fit of enthusiasm for an individual, they can be induced to lay their liberties at the feet even of a great man, or trust him with powers which enable him to subvert their institutions; in all these cases they are more or less unfit for liberty: and though it may be for their good to have had it even for a short time, they are unlikely long to enjoy it." -- John Stuart Mill, Representative Government, 1861

"We've witnessed a fire sale of American liberties at bargain basement prices, in return for the false promise of more security... The America being designed right now won't resemble the America we've been defending... The danger isn't that Big Brother may storm the castle gates. The danger is that Americans don't realize that he is already inside the castle walls." -- Wayne LaPierre

"Noncooperation with evil is as much a duty as cooperation with good." -- Gandhi

"The government is merely a servant -- merely a temporary servant; it cannot be its prerogative to determine what is right and what is wrong, and decide who is a patriot and who isn't. Its function is to obey orders, not originate them..." -- Mark Twain

"I've set my own rules to live by. The first one is: 'Never believe ANYthing the government says.' "-- George Carlin

"The world is a dangerous place to live; not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about it." -- Albert Einstein

"The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in a time of moral crisis, maintain their neutrality." -- Dante, The Inferno