Posted by
Victor on Wednesday, September 30, 2009 7:21:00 PM
My son asked why I was voicing reservations about the activities of our elected representatives in Government over the past 20+ years. I shared with him a number of thoughts I had, and finally sent him this letter.
Letter to Paul: Sept. 8, 2009
Paul: Let me know what you think. I started with a few basic ideas about changing our current political party actions, which I think are leading inexorably towards anarchy. I have a number of friends across the political spectrum, and they are mostly moving towards a state of uneasiness and a feeling that it may be too late to save the Democratic Constitutional basis for the USA.
Consider that I was at Stanford working on my Masters in Chem. when Mario Savio and his group formed the Free Speech Movement at UCal-Berkeley in 1964. Savio was a Physics major, and quite smart. Several of us from Stanford went to Berkeley five or six times to get involved with the FSM. (I was a little more 'leftist' then than I am now that I've grown up.)
At this time(1966) I was a Graduate Student and involved with faculty/student council discussions. David Harris was undergrad Student Body President. He was a very smart and left leaning individual; and a strong Anti-Vietnam War Activist. He refused to be enlisted and was sent to prison for a year or so. He married Joan Baez a couple of years later, but the marriage didn’t last. We had a few late night seminars with Berkeley and Stanford students; and a lot of hootenanny’s. I played my guitar. Bob Dylan came through the Bay Area a couple of times. I suspect he was in love with Joan Baez, but who wasn't?
Bill Ayers (Obama's buddy in Chicago) and his girlfriend a few others formed the Weather Underground and Students for a Democratic Society in the late '60s while I was at Florida State U. (1967-70) getting my PhD. In 1970 I took my first faculty position at Indiana University NW in Gary, Indiana. I attended a couple of meetings in Chicago where Ayers spoke, along with the Black Panthers, plus more meetings in Gary.
What Savio, Harris and Ayers have/had in common is that they were extreme leftists. They were members of a small group of very intelligent people. They tried to change people by telling them what they needed to do and when to do it. They thought that since they were so intelligent, it was their right to do that(much like many of the current people in charge of our government). Except for Harris, they all moved very quickly to use of force and violence to get attention, via bombs mostly. They thought they were right to do this. What they did would have led to a state of anarchy in which individuals did what they wanted with no governmental interference.
They scared me. What I see going on today depresses (and scares) me even more. I'm not sure, but it looks like the Government is employing as much as 30% of the workers. The situation is not new. It's been in action since the US was formed. It's an uneasy alliance between big money and political power, but that alliance seems to be firmly in control at this time.
Anyway, I have time on my hands to read and watch tv and surf the net to get ideas and share thoughts. I believe something like my proposal, from the grassroots level, could get enough people involved in developing a set of rights and responsibilities that almost everyone would accept; and once that is done we could design a governmental structure and function that would preserve and protect instead of taking, directing and controlling.
I'm still putting together the blog, and trying to get suggestions about how to disseminate it broadly enough to get something started. That's why I've been looking at the way Wikipedia got started and developed.
Think and respond.
Check ‘http://www.constitution2011.com’