not feeling the lj love

Still not able to see my friend's page in the morning. I'm getting tired of this, it's been going on all week. I remember when having a paid account meant your journal was placed on a better server. No more; now it just means you don't have to see ads.

If this keeps up i may start doing my primary journaling over on wordpress or transadvocate and simply use this journal to mirror my posts. Is there a utility that will capture all of a journal's entries and repost them on some other bloghost?

government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth

Yesterday was July 4, and i spent some time reflecting on sentiments formalized by the Continental Congress 231 years ago.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Beautiful words, and it is hard not to love the sentiment behind them. Yet barely 9 years later, several of the people who signed this document were calling for men to be put to death for (mostly peacefully) resisting injustice supported by their government. Others used the event in question to bolster their argument that the federal government must be strengthened and expanded.

This event was known as Shays' Rebellion, a peasant uprising in protest against the large number of farmers in western Massachusetts who were being driven off their land by debtor's courts and foreclosing banks.

Eight years after that, George Washington (then US president) personally commanded a militia assembled to put down the Whiskey Rebellion in Pennsylvania. This, too, was essentially a peasant revolt.

And so, less than 20 years after the Declaration of Independence was signed, the nascent United States was already defying its own founding principles, using force to suppress dissent and civil disobedience.

Thomas Jefferson grasped the wrongness of this, though i suspect when he wrote this he was being maybe a little facetious:

A little rebellion now and then is a good thing. ... [W]hat country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to the facts, pardon and pacify them. 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.

What does it mean that even the people who wrote and promoted these words could only carry them so far, and not to their natural conclusion? These words, drawn by a collection of men many of whom were slaveowners, rest side-by-side in a document characterizing Indians as "merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions."

It tells us something interesting about the human mind, that one can apprehend an important new principle without really seeing how it applies to oneself and one's own interests. This is why it is vitally important to nurture dissent and honest discourse -- because sometimes we need other people to point out our own shortsightedness.

It tells us something else interesting about the human mind, that it is able to draw inspiration from words beyond what they were really intended to mean, in the process creating a new trajectory in human history. The American Revolution and the subsequent birth of the American Empire would not have been anything new in human history; racism and the use of government force to maintain an unjust social order are common motifs, and revolution so often represents only a changing of the guard. And yet along with it came this sentiment which we have elevated to nearly the status of scripture, because of its capacity to inspire hope that we will someday chart a path to a more complete understanding of human freedom.