Imagine

I was home schooled for all but one year. My mother collected a truly strange array of textbooks, hoping to widen my scope beyond the norm. She gave me everything from U.S. Mennonite Bible-study books to Yemeni secularist-socialist social studies, trusting that I'd make up my own mind. School is the single most important advertising ground in the world. The greatest lesson that I learned was how to recognize marketing and that anyone who is absolutely certain of the facts in an event that they didn’t personally witness is either naïve or trying to sell you something.

So it is with Davey Crockett's, "Not yours to give" speech. One side says that it was a congressional address, another says that congressional addresses weren’t recorded in that era and that the speech originated in an 1884 dime novel. The sacred debunker, Snopes.com, is mum on the matter thus far. In any case, it makes a decent fable.

The story goes that Crockett voted against giving a heroic Navy-man’s widow a pension on the grounds that the founding fathers wanted their new government to be a minimalist protectorate and challenged his fellow congressmen to support her out of their own pockets.

In my mind, that is the essence of what the United States of America SHOULD be, unencumbered benevolence. According to legend, the founding fathers tried to cut away the bureaucracy that they were under. That's why they were willing to fight and die. Personal freedom.
Granted, the majority came from the racist caste system found in European Christendom, but most of their writings speak of wanting to create something better. The problem is that sweeping social change rarely comes all at once. In their embryonic democracy, they couldn't even decide whether they should levy taxes or not. Nathan Hale felt betrayed that they’d even consider it. George Washington had to decline kingship. There was a lot of confusion.

Remember that in the battle of the Barbary Coast, the US first tangle with jihadists that turned to piracy, the founding fathers added and signed an article that isn't in the Middle Eastern version of their treaty. Article 11, declaring the US a secular, minimal Union of individual, free states. They wanted the world to know that, so that the reputation would hold their successors accountable.

Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It doesn't matter what your neighbor is smoking and imbibing, who they're sleeping with or what weapons they have, as long as they're not hurting anyone. Those were the original, rebellious US values, no matter what any revisionist says. A house was to be a near-sovereign state in and of itself. The Confederates added something similar to their own constitution. It wasn’t an original thought.

If Ben Franklin really said that “beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy,” I doubt that he'd approve of any form of prohibition. He's the same guy that designed, drafted and submitted a plan for a British parliament building with a chimney under each seat because he thought they were full of it. He invented the term "battery" because he used his array of Leyden jar capacitors to throw lightning across the room and liven up parties (hence the key & kite and invention of the lightning rod). He reputedly had a special room built in his house so that he could practice “air-bathing,” or nudism without anyone seeing him. Does that sound like an uptight Puritan to you?
At the first opportunity, Washington issued a statement of neutrality concerning wars in Europe, which mirror Jefferson's public statements. These people weren't out to police and control the world, they rebelled against that very mindset. It was supposed to be a peaceful, ever-improving state.

I said the words "tea party" before Obama was in office, and I stand behind that (not with any organization using that name, mind you).
Bullets or pills, these hucksters have made a business of taking your money and as they do it, they’re ripping any remnant of a benevolent heart out of this country.

Imagine if people set up legal social constructs that were free of both B.o.B/Fed and Wall Street greed.
Imagine "farm-bureau" medical insurance, where the board of investors are the consumers. Imagine if every vote counted. Imagine if every law was put to a public vote. Imagine if lawmakers weren't full time employees. Imagine if your leaders weren't sponsored by corporations and special interests. Then the economic bullies that are untouchable today might be prosecuted.

Imagine anything but what your big-business political heroes are selling you and you'll be their worst nightmare: a free thinker.