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writing for godot

Rolling In the Freedom of Their Graves

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Written by Andor Carnes   
Thursday, 14 May 2015 22:16
Opinion: Rolling In the Freedom of Their Graves

In response to: “Why The Founders Would Decry What America Has Become”
by Michael Payne - RSN Wednesday, 22 April 2015

By idealizing our Founding Fathers so, like so many well intentioned others, you miss the true genius in the ultimate legacy of their persistent efforts.

It is surely true that our world today is likely far beyond anything our Founding Fathers could have ever imagined –in content, integration, efficiency/inefficiency and speed. Yet, our world today is also incredibly similar to theirs in the risk, cruelty, inequity, misrepresentation, and the stress points for any individual. Therefore, to say today would represent a devastating disappointment to the Founding Fathers is to idealize them far beyond what their own sensibilities would allow –even from the freedoms of their graves.

Our Founding Fathers were extraordinary at many things, and driven by the times, some very useful facets of their brilliance emerged. Nevertheless, to deny that they were caught deeply in, and contributed regularly to, the horrifically damaging policies, politics and practices of the day is to deny their perhaps most genius attribute – for some unknown reason, they were able to collaboratively work to protect future generations from usury, manipulative and self-aggrandizing organizations and individuals like themselves.

I am certain that they would tell you that they did not expect to eliminate the extreme public vulnerabilities to greed but that they did hope to effectively anticipate and plan against their continuation. They worked diligently toward protecting ourselves from ourselves well enough to avoid, as a nation, ever imploding because of our own cruel natures. If one studies the true similarities in proportional scale of their behaviors and issues compared to ours, then that accomplishment alone, is the single most transforming legacy of their tenure, and it is, contrary to the clichéd criticisms today, clearly working even better today –an accomplishment, which is unfortunately beyond appropriate recognition.

Understanding our Founding Fathers’ historically stunning achievements, for which we are all the continued beneficiaries, is best done through the perspective of just what kind of businessmen and members of society they were and perpetuated. By today’s standards, they would be the elite, predatory, chauvinistic, and powerful -all driven by developing the best routes to free and extensive commerce and generally smaller governmental intervention in all but the protection of rights and commerce. Highly contrary to your interesting observations, they would never look at today’s world and wonder at its problems. They would see the threads and extreme similarities running straight back to their policies, manipulations and practices, reluctant or not, in domestic and global trade and heartland development. With that insight, what better individuals to protect us against their own understanding of their practices?

For example, Jefferson would clearly see no significant difference between our dilemmas in worldwide protection of our international and national commerce and rampant threats of terrorism than those of his and Congress against the Ottoman Empire and its Barbary States in the Mediterranean generally from 1795 to 1805. He and others, like Adams and Madison, might indeed see orders of scale differences from today. However, in terms of the impact of such aggressions, real and potential on the American economy, psyche, politic, wellbeing and individual prosperity/disparity, and their attempts to mitigate them,
I believe they would see little difference from today’s context. In fact, in terms of the impact on the American economy and budgets, in their day for instance, building, deploying and maintaining an appropriate Naval presence to protect American Merchant and economic interests abroad was ironically at a far greater proportional impact on the then young and tenuous American financial position than on today’s American stability.

In further example, America did not have the finances to pay the tributes demanded by the Barbary States; so, they chose to aggressively push back against the terrorism. If America had indeed been in a position to pay the ransoms and escalating yearly tributes to the Barbary States to retrieve enslaved merchants and temporarily ward off further attacks, they probably would have behaved exactly like the European powers in the area, like Great Britain, Spain, France and Denmark, and simply would have gone on capitulating to the Barbary States’ demands, until they simply could no longer pay the astronomical sums.

As it turned out, America’s stance to show strong diplomatic pressure, backed by as strong of a Naval presence as we could afford, ultimately broke the habitual terrorism in the Mediterranean, and gave the European powers the push they needed to also break the Ottoman Empire’s unjustified grip on the European State’s maritime commerce in the area. Our general United States stance on terrorism and aggression against American commercial interests worldwide has not changed since Jefferson’s time.

There will always be statements like, “The Founding Fathers would be devastated at what they had seen, unable to comprehend what the country that they had created had now become.” Such observations come partially from the unknowable and the unknown. “Unknown” here means not truly studying what our Founding Fathers were really like in their everyday as well as their extraordinary lives. “Unknowable” means that unreachable understanding and knowledge about our Founding Fathers that cannot be retrieved because it was lost in time or never known by anyone other than for instance Jefferson himself. It is unfortunately normal to assess their possible perspectives and view points on our world by attributing them as guided by their legacies of history and not by their personal behaviors.

Our Founding Fathers truly and undeniably protected us all from their less than honorable behaviors. Those behaviors have everything in common with the people and the systems we so like to blame and hate in today’s world. Nothing has actually changed in regard to those behaviors other than the fact that the Founding Fathers are dead, and death and time tend to leave only the ramifications of deeds and not much in the way of the motivation of an inspired, very personal “why” behind them.

Ironically, the average person in our modern society would not like or respect the Founding Fathers, if those Founding Fathers were alive and functioning in our society at an appropriate level beyond dead today, any more than they do any other famous and powerful person who does well, while the rest of the population struggles. In fact, the Founding Fathers would fit right in today and actually could be disproportionately powerful and manipulative –probably having far more use of their intelligent faculties than most or all politicians today enjoy.

There of course is little chance the Founding Fathers will ever give up their secrets of bad behavior. Nevertheless, we can still glean much from just an attempt to understand the men behind the power, influence and actions and from a fair approach that allows men who manipulate the populace for self-gain to also see their shortcomings and work hard to protect our future worlds from that constant in man. That understanding of protection on, for instance, Jefferson’s part is infinitely more important than the final accomplishments. This is the transformational lesson, we have yet to learn; so, we can take the next step in that extraordinary chain.

I personally do not believe that Jefferson, or probably any Founding Father, would find anything but the greatest joy in watching our still fledgling country protect itself from the world and itself. They would not see evil and demise here but rather progress and persistence –two things they understood intrinsically. Of course, they would probably spend all their time reveling in the fact that they were not dead; so, little would be accomplished in getting their opinions about such ultimately trivial-in-time national issues.

History is lazy, and we suffer for the trait. The Founding Fathers were perhaps more human than most, and yet, we subtract that from them and thus miss the entire salient, paramount point –they decided to protect us against natures like theirs. The problem could be that in the process they inspired they could not protect us against our inability to look further than the ideal. Jefferson, for instance, I am sure would love what we are today, and still as any human, he might pine at the continued usually low bar of our societal achievements -in the face of such plenty.

“Rolling in a grave” also does not have to mean frustration but rather can mean joy at observing that contemplated freedoms are proving to be incrementally possible and sustainable, even if they are far from fully realized. Progress and relative time are some very universally misunderstood and malpracticed sensibilities. After all, to a dead person, our frustration over the speed and greed of things probably looks ridiculous.

I guess the tragedy of it all could be that a dead person, even Thomas Jefferson, could be more likely than the living to see the wonder and every day gift that as human beings we progress at all.
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