Last screening: I have been studying the Ken Burns biography of Thomas Jefferson the last few nights. Such an amazing experience this is. because he was an impressive man. A true scholar. Scientist, architect, statesman, the first American renaissance man. Not quite fully realized in other areas, refused to free the slaves he held captive even though most around him in his state of Virginia did. and he readily admitted that he knew it was wrong of him. he said America would pay dearly for slavery if God truly was just. But boy those first few lines of the declaration that he wrote. He was brilliant. Louisiana purchase, thereby booting France and England et al off of the continent so America could have it all for itself. The Lewis and Clark expedition. On and on. 

A real revolutionary and radical. After the French revolution, and when he heard that poor Massachusetts farmers had taken up arms against their rich creditors, he sided with them. He tells his friend and soon to be enemy due to this very point, John Adams that “God forbid that we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion; what country can preserve its liberties if its rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance. Let them take arms. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.” He started republicanism. Not quite the same today as Jefferson envisioned it. 

This is the Thomas Jefferson that Americans love. And this is why. But he is not speaking about taking up arms against foreign powers thousands of miles away like Iraq is he? He is talking about right here in America. It is amazing how quickly a country’s people can get lost in jingoism and false patriotism, and false rhetoric, as America is today by the foolish and wicked regime that controls its government. America is in a much different place today than it was two hundred years ago. You don't get the idea that these men in power today are as interested in what's best for America the beautiful as much as they are other interests entirely. Just recently in our history our weak and cowardly congress passed a bill allowing the president to take over 80 billion dollars from the American people to spend on rebuilding another country, the country of Iraq. When on the tip of every tongue in this country is how bad our economy is, how much everyone is struggling around us, how big our deficit is when just four years ago we actually had a surplus, how high our unemployment rate is, and how low our interest rates are. it is a hard time to make money in America. For a lot of people it is a hard time to try to even make ends meet. But somehow the country’s rulers --- the same rulers that Jefferson was referring to in that dialogue above ---- found a way to justify taking even more away from the American people. For someone else’s fortune and someone else’s agenda, and certainly not for our own. 

I love America. It is a subject I am so passionate about, that it occupies much of any free time I ever find myself with. When I study our short history I wonder what happened to men like Jefferson and Washington and Madison and Monroe and Adams and Franklin. What is going on now? Who are these men who become presidents now? is it true as Eisenhower once implied that America is now sold out to a military industrial complex that cares not for the people or the country but only for its own selfish interests and money making? Is it true what has been whispered behind closed doors and yelled at protest marches for thirty years now that America was taken over in 1963 in what is now called the ‘election on the grassy knoll’ in Dallas, Texas? Could it be? is the America we study in schools when we are children and celebrate on July fourth just a memory now? a dead relative? A phantom? Wishful thinking? Nostalgia? Do we need another revolution? Would the people of America ever ... could they? Are they capable of it? do most Americans even know that there is something wrong? at this point with everything I have seen gone awry in my short life, all the wrong doings and lies and deceptions, I wonder what it would take to get the American people to rise up against the rulers if they had to again to defend our great country.

I ponder this often. I wonder what it would take. When you think of the sixties and how everytime someone got too close or too powerful to the mysterious and nefarious and invisible powers that over took the real America, people like the Kennedy brothers, or Malcolm or Dr. Martin Luther king or the black panthers or abbie Hoffman or so many more, they were either murdered or imprisoned or exiled. There was a very strong message that was drilled into the subconscious of the American people during those tumultuous ten years and that message was “There will be no more of your protesting; at least not if you intend on accomplishing anything real. We will not stand for them. Changes will be made when we want to change things. Do not speak up too loudly or too strongly or act too boldly. Because we will not stand for it. do not demand what you want over what we the rulers in government want. Because we will not stand for it. Those days are gone. This is not the America of the revolutionary war era. This is a very different America from this decade forward. Now please go home. Watch your TV. and mind your family. Your government, whoever that happens to be in any given time, knows best. Thank you. And good night.”