In Loco Parentis
Sam Aurelius Milam III
 When
I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned
like a child; when I became a man, I gave up childish ways.1 Corinthians 13:11 Holy Bible Revised Standard Version |
The
Declaration
of Independence proclaims certain ideas.
All
men are created equal.
God
endowed men with certain inalienable rights, including life, liberty, and
the pursuit of happiness.
The
legitimate purpose of governments is to secure such rights.
Governments
derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.
If
a government becomes destructive of such ends, then the people have the
right to abolish it and to create a new one in its place.
When
I was young, I uncritically accepted those ideas. As my knowledge
and experience grew, I came to understand them differently. I realized
that men are not all created equal. It was a lie in 1776 and it's
a lie today. The idea that rights come from God is as false as was
the idea of the divine right of kings. Neither kings nor rights come
from God. If something is inalienable, then that means that it can't
be taken away. Rights are taken away all the time, so they're not
inalienable. The purpose of government isn't to secure rights, but
to control people. Governments don't derive their powers, just or
unjust, from the consent of the governed, but from the gullibility and
compliance of the governed. The people don't have a right to abolish
a bad government. People who try to do so will be accused of sedition,
insurrection, treason, terrorism, conspiracy, revolution, or anything else
that will enable the government to claim legitimacy when it attacks them,
burns their homes, murders their wives and children, and imprisons or executes
the survivors. The only true statement in the entire list is that,
on those rare occasions when a bad government is successfully abolished,
a new one will always be created in its place. The new one will always
turn out to be just as bad as the one that it replaced.
People
are highly susceptible to being deceived and manipulated by such politically
motivated documents as The Declaration of Independence. Alexis
de Tocqueville noted that, in a democracy, people get the kind of government
that they deserve. The U.S. government isn't a democracy but I suppose
that it's close enough for de Tocqueville's comment to apply. As
long as people continue to speak like children, think like children, and
reason like children, they're going to have paternalistic governments that
treat them like children.
Truth
Sam Aurelius Milam III
| And
if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed if all records
told the same tale then the lie passed into history and became truth. from 1984 by George Orwell |
Sometimes
I watch Stories from the Stage, on PBS. Even if some of the
stories aren't interesting, they can still provide something innocuous
for me to watch while I'm eating my lunch. Some of them are annoying,
and those can provide me with a reason to write an article.
On
one episode of Stories from the Stage, Changed
Forever 9/11, a creative arts therapist named Jude Treder-Wolff
told a story about a 9/11 anniversary event that she attended in 2015.
The event was held annually by an organization called Voices of September
11. It offered trauma recovery and resilience training for first
responders. Jude recalled a speaker at the event that year who claimed
to have been the FBI agent who'd been responsible for the final disposition
of the pieces of the airplane that had flown into the Pentagon. According
to Jude, the FBI agent reported that she'd been going through the various
pieces when she saw something sticking out of a seat-back. She reached
in and pulled out a pocket book. In the pocket book was a wallet
that contained some tightly folded letters. According to the FBI
agent, the letters had been written by a woman who'd been in the airplane,
as an attempt to communicate with her family, before she died. She'd
apparently written the letters before the airplane crashed into the Pentagon,
folded them, stuffed them into the wallet, and stuffed it all into the
seat-back. The FBI
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