Tag: history

Do Not Conflate Liberty with Freedom

by kendunning, posted in Community, Economics, Government, Oppression, Politics, Spirituality, Sustainability

In the U.S.A. there is a great travesty taking place within our thinking and within our expressions.  That is the conflation of “liberty” with “freedom”.  They are not the same and they were not when the Founding Fathers of the United States fought for the blessings of liberty. Not freedom, liberty. 

Liberty is the freedom from oppressive restrictions upon one’s way of life.  This in no way states nor implies the freedom to do whatever one wants to do.  Oppression is the unjust infliction of hardship and constraint upon a subordinate group.

Some freedoms, including unbridled freedom in the marketplace, are what enable some to acquire an inordinate amount of wealth and power which then enables them to oppress others.

In order to preserve our liberty, We the People must predominantly agree our liberty is a precious thing to be preserved.  As Liberty is a paramount value in the United States as expressed in both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, if any subgroup decides otherwise and acquires and exercises the means to subvert the value of liberty within our culture, for one citizen or the entirety of the citizenry, they are violating that paramount freedom. They have entered into actively subverting the values and principles that the United States was founded upon.  They have set upon overturning our nation, our culture, and our lives.   When this occurs it is usually being engaged in by individuals or groups who have been acquiring inordinate amounts of wealth and then using that wealth to acquire (buy) inordinate political influence.

It’s not that capitalism is inherently bad.  It’s that the men and women practicing it must recognize the implicit social compact necessary to preserve our essential liberty:  they should not take too much.  They should not “drain the economic well”.  This is important to ensure that the average citizens of the U.S.  do not become impoverished and economically enslaved.  But impoverishment and economic slavery is happening pervasively in the U.S.A. and elsewhere in the world.

Sacrificing the American peoples’ hard-won liberty for the freedom of unbridled predatory capitalism is a travesty and a grievous insult to all of the men and women who have worked and fought to establish and preserve liberty for us and future generations. 

Vladimir Putin is not Russia and Donald Trump is not the United States

by kendunning, posted in Building our future., Community, Donald Trump, Environment, Health, Mental Health, Personal Development, Politics, Psychology, Spirituality, Sustainability, Vladimir Putin
(C) Alex Max, http://www.fotosearch. com

When did it happen? When did people around the world begin to identify an entire nation on the basis of the character of whomever happens to occupy high political office within that nation? It’s as ridiculous a practice as trying to characterize the ocean on the basis of the behavior of a single fish. It always, absolutely always, provides us with a distorted, inaccurate, conception of the nation concerned.

Vladimir Putin is not Russia. Donald Trump is not the United States. Nor was Joe Biden, Barack Obama, nor any other President. Likewise Xi Jinping is not China and Volodymyr Zelenskyy is not the Ukraine. Droupadi Murmu is not India. No single man nor woman ever has nor ever will be the sum total of the nation which they find themselves in a position of leadership within. And so it goes with every single nation on the face of the Earth.

A nation is the people who live within it. A nation is the people who farm the land, occupy the cities, build the houses, clean the streets, cook the food, create the art, attend the concerts, eat at the restaurants, and generally participate in all the activities which sustain, enliven and enlighten the bodies and spirits, the hearts and minds, of the citizenry. If you travel the world it doesn’t take long to realize that the citizenry of every nation on Earth is pretty much the same. We breath, we eat, we love, we work, we play, we worry, we laugh, we eat, we read, we celebrate,  we grieve. With our work, with the time and energy of our lives, we strive in myriad ways to improve our lives and the lives of others within our communities. So why do we, the citizenry of the nations of the world, allow the misbegotten, and often grandiose, aspirations, or the fears, of one person or group of people to lead us into conflict with one another? Conflicts which obliterate so much of what we and our ancestors have worked so hard to build? Cities, homes, farms, shops, restaurants, concert halls, hospitals, schools, the productions, the dreams, of so many people over so long a period of time. And then there are the human costs, the suffering, the deaths of so very many including family and loved ones.

War, conflict, any extreme competition which theatens the life or well-being of the citizens of any nation, or even a single individual, is something which threatens the life and well-being of us all. Why? Because the spirit of competition for territory or other worldly wealth inevitably leads to larger conflicts. Larger conflicts which lay the stepping stones on the road to war. It is like a contagious virus which spreads through the hearts and minds of people who are vulnerable to it. It breeds fear of those whom we perceive, or more often are told, want to take something from us which we hold dear. And we human beings have an innate tendency to try to destroy, to kill, that which we fear. On the other hand, to want others to fear us is inescapably, no matter how much we may think otherwise, to lead others to desire to destroy us.

We cannot fully develop our innate capacities as human beings when we live our lives burdened by fear; experiencing the stresses and debilitation, the actual trauma, which fear inevitably brings into our lives.

It’s high time we average people, average citizens, the true builders of civilizations, stop letting ourselves be blind followers of those among us with the most needy egos, the most avaricious among us, the most callous among us. It’s time we see through the half truths and outright lies the bought and paid for media outlets insistently try to present to us as reality. It’s time we realize our shared divine heritage here on this planet and treat ourselves and the planet with the love and respect we, and it, rightfully deserve.