Head Dress Tattoo blog

Today I received a mass email from my grandmother that made me feel nauseous. Since I’m sure whoever authored it has no intention of keeping it private, I’ll paste it here:

“>> HOW LONG DOES THE USA HAVE?
>>
>> This is the most interesting thing I’ve read in a long time. The sad
>> thing
>>
>> About it, you can see it coming. I have always heard about this
>>
>> Democracy countdown. It is interesting to see it in print. God
help
>>
>> us, not that we deserve it.
>>
>>
>>
>> How Long Do We Have?
>>
>> About the time our original thirteen states adopted their new
>> constitution in 1787, Alexander Tyler, a Scottish history professor
at
>> the University of Edinburgh, had this to say about the fall of the
>> Athenian Re public some 2,000 years earlier:
>>
> ;> >
>>
>> ‘A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as
a
>> permanent form of government.’
>>
>> ‘A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters
>> discover they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public
>> treasury.’ ‘From that moment on, the majority always vote for the
>> candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury,
with
>> the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose
>> fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship.’
>>
>> ‘The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations from the
>> beginning of history, has been about 200 years’
>>
>> ‘During those 200 years, those nations always progressed through the
>> following sequence:
>>
>> >
>>
>> 1. From bond age to spiritual faith;
>>
>> 2. From spiritual faith to great courage; 3. From courage to liberty;
4.
>> From liberty to abundance; 5. From abundance to complacency; 6. From
>> complacency to apathy; 7. From apathy to dependence; 8. From
dependence
>> back into bondage’
>>
>> >;
>>
>> Professor Joseph Olson of Hemline University School of Law, St .
Paul,
>> Minnesota, points out some interesting facts concerning the 2000
>> Presidential election:
>>
>> >
>>
>> Number of States won by:
>>
>> Gore: 19
>>
>> Bush: 29
>>
>> >
>>
>> Square miles of land won by:
>>
>> Gore: 580,000
>>
>> Bush: 2,427,000
>>
>> >
>>
>> Population of counties won by:
>> ;
>> Gore: 127 million
>>
>> Bush: 143 million
>>
>> >
>>
>> Murder rate per 100,000 residents in counties won by:
>>
>> Gore: 13.2
>>
>> Bush: 2.1
>>
>> >
>>
>> Professor Olson adds: ‘In aggregate, the map of the territory Bush
won
>> was mostly the land owned by the taxpaying citizens of this great
>> country.
>>
>> Gore’s territory mostly encompassed those citizens living in
>> government-owned tenements and living off various forms of government
>> welfare…’ Olson believes the United States is now somewhere between
>> the ‘complacency and apathy’ phase of Professor Tyler’s definition of
>> democracy, with some forty percent of the nation’s population already
>> having reached the ‘governmental dependency’ phase.
>>
& gt;> >
>>
>> If Congress grants amnesty and citizenship to twenty million criminal
>> invaders called illegal and they vote, then we can say goodbye to the
>> USA in fewer than five years.
>>
>> >
>>
>> If you are in favor of this, then delete this message. If you are
not,
>> then Pass this along to help everyone realize just how much is at
stake,
>> knowing that apathy is the greatest danger to our freedom. Thanks
for
>> reading.
>>
>> >
>>
>> ps. Most of us grew up with the saying ‘history always repeats
itself.’
>>
>> The American people really need to think seriously about WHO they
will
>> be voting for.”

Here is my response:

This is strange Republican propaganda. The beginning makes sense. The reason a democracy only lasts 200 years is because a real democracy is impossible. The democracy envisioned in the USA was based on Thomas Jefferson’s lifestyle, consisting of small agricultural towns where everyone saw each other regularly, shared news and information, and helped each other out.

It could take a book to explain how we deviated from this, but in short, the industrial revolution moved most of the country’s population to urban areas. We are all now psychologically separated from each other, even if we are geographically piled on top of one another. Second, even if you could get all 300 million Americans to vote in a presidential election (only 100 million voted in the 2000 election), the only way for an election to matter is if people are making educated decisions. In modern times, people would rather jump on a political “team” and let their first emotional response to controversial topics (like abortion and gay marriage) dictate their vote. In other words, they make decisions about their involvement in culture, society, and politics, without ever really learning how our nation works and what their action (or inaction) means.

This is a good time to look at the REAL information from the 2000 election, conveniently organized on Wikipedia (Wikipedia is a great example of how the internet can transform our general state of ignorance into one of knowledge — and by the way, it IS a dependable source of information, as dependable as Encyclopedia Britannica).

Bush was elected because he had more electoral votes, but Gore won the popular vote. That means more human beings voted for Gore (48.4% to Bush’s 47.9%), but, because of our outdated and dysfunctional electoral college system, Bush won. All these statistics about “square miles of land won” and “population of counties won” are useless and probably phony. We’ve all gotten pretty used to the red and blue map on the Wikipedia page, which depicts states that are more Democratic or more Republican. For example, it’s easy to see that the largest states (by square miles) are the ones like Texas and the Great Plains, where Republicans usually win.

The point is that our “democracy” has dwindled to senseless arguing over a few trite issues that have nothing to do with “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Most people are satisfied with this. I am not. The most ironic thing about the previous message is that the Republican camp has manipulated and benefited the most from the “abundance, complacency, apathy, dependence, and bondage” in that checklist.

That’s not to say that the Democrats are any more effective. Neither party currently serves the unification needs of the country. We’re at a stalemate, and we’re starting to fester. But the previous message is really a disguised Republican message expressing the fear over immigration issues — even though our country was founded by immigrants, and has been further populated by immigrants over the past two centuries. Whether the legions of Bush lovers like it or not, we live in a global society. Although the government will benefit from scaring you into to thinking our jobs and families and lives are being invaded — either by immigrants or terrorists or aliens or giant pandas — I prefer to look through the charade.

(On a side note, yesterday I heard an ignorant man in Traverse City exclaim that, “if we sent the Marines in there, we’d get them gas prices down.” He was apparently unaware that the actions of the Bush Administration in the Middle East have cost us around $2 trillion, some of which is creating this $4/gal gas price. Cheney and friends sustained and worsened the chaos in Iraq in order to maintain our occupation of the country. Cheney and the Bush family are also under suspicion for their business involvements with the oil industry in the Middle East, since it’s highly likely that they will benefit financially from having a military presence in the region. Watch the documentary “No End In Sight” for more information on the endless mistakes they’ve made, from the mouths of US govt officials, diplomats, and armed forces. I enclosed this section in parentheses because critics will undoubtedly call it “liberal propaganda.”)

Apathy IS the greatest threat to our personal freedom. However, joining a political party, becoming a racist or bigot, and believing in falsified mass emails…those are not going to help us regain freedom.

Sorry for the outburst, but it’s my job to fight injustice. And it makes me angry to see people I care about being subjected to false, malicious material on the internet.

Please send THIS on to anyone who is tired of being fed lies, political or otherwise.