None dare call it treason!

There are a number of people in the media and in public life who are calling the actions of Edward Snowden a treasonous event. But there are others who are calling him a hero who has exposed the machinations of a potentially intrusive government. Either way one looks at this treason situation, it is in the eye of the beholder and it didn’t used to be that way. At least to the extent that it is in the nation and the world today.

We are a nation divided and it is getting long in the tooth that way. There is no longer any apparent way to construct a consensus in a nation that began its existence due to the actions of a minority of those who wanted a better way forward for themselves and the majority who took no actual part in what went on to arrive at the conclusions that were arrived at. Instead of being at war with a foreign power such as the British or, later, the former Soviet Union, we are a nation that is at war with itself. It seems that when we have no foreign power to bring us together, we fight among ourselves. And that has not always been that way either. Through so much of our existence as a nation and a people, the periods of peace and tranquility were exactly that--periods of peace and tranquility. But, beneath the surface of that seeming tranquility there were the simmering issues such as the fact that certain minorities were being held down from the potential that they might have within the common whole. Between the wars before the Civil War, there was the boiling pot of slavery and the economic and social issues associated with it. If we think that we have problems today, they are no worse than what faced the nation before the eruption in 1861 after the election of Abraham Lincoln. Millions of people were affected and hundreds of thousands died as we came to a violent resolution to our national “problem.�

An entire way of life was ended for an important region of this nation--the south--at a time when there was not the balance that came with the admission of the western states to the union that occurred after the fetters of whether they would be admitted free or slave were removed from the national debate. Now, much of the west has joined with the old south to create another imbalance that threatens us all.

It is interesting to note that the United States did not become a legitimate world power until after the Civil War when the world could no longer ignore the potential importance of what Napoleon had commented upon after the Louisiana Purchase when he said that he had helped to create a potential world power with the land that had been transferred from France to this nation.

But there has always been a streak of isolationism and self centeredness to this country that has manifested itself through the decades and the centuries since the nation was founded. As we look at modern, or perhaps post modern America, we should not be surprised at views held by some of our more conservative elements that include the idea that there is no evolution or applicable science that is not confirmed by the Christian Bible. Not to mention the contrived debate over whether the climate is changing in the face of over whelming evidence to the contrary that can be seen by the average American across his lifetime if they care but to remember. America, as a nation and a people, has always contained within itself some very odd notions expressed by those who have taken the idea of freedom of expression and thought to some very great extremes. We once had a religious sect within this nation who made itself extinct because it did not believe in sex or reproduction. And there are those among us who regularly predict the second coming of Jesus Christ and take that opportunity to cease all economic activity as they await the faithful date, always in the face of the fact that the Bible plainly states that not even Christ would know, by his own admission, when that date might arrive. We, as a nation, have been astounded by the fact that there have been individuals such as the cult leader Jim Jones who might take followers to the extremes of drinking a toxic cool aid and ending their lives strictly on his advice. However, people who are frightened by that fact regularly take the advice of people such as Rush Limbaugh who may be just as strange, in the face of history, as any in the past have been.

The great difference in this world and the world of the past is the proliferation of instantaneous media that make people like Limbaugh and their ideas so prevalent among the many that so willingly follow them. No one knew for some time that Andrew Jackson was a hero because it took so long for news of his victory in the battle of New Orleans to get back to the rest of the organized world.

Now, we make and destroy heroes in the course of a twenty four hour news cycle. The old idea of “fifteen minutes of fame� predates the modern internet and multi media period but it has never been more true than it is today. With at least five hundred cable networks, that fifteen minutes is multiplied by the number of outlets available to spread the “news.� Not to mention the internet! And then we have the current advertising commercial that states that everything on the internet must be true! Truth is a more precious commodity today than it has ever been before and it is subject to interpretations by those who have no training in how to interpret than we have ever seen before. In point of fact, trying to find a central truth is like the search for the Holy Grail and is about as frustrating an activity as Don Quixote’s tilting at windmills.

Everyone who wants one, can find a truth and the proponents of it to serve their needs. But it is sad to note that there are those who are putting out truths to serve their needs and those needs to not correlate with what used to be the national will and the national good. Some things never change and truth is still truth and lies are still lies.

There have been periods of our history when our national government has not been very intrusive in our lives but, under the surface, the federal governments ability to affect our lives has always been there. Looking back at the American Civil War, it was decisions made by the congress and the courts in the decades leading up to it that brought its violence about. But there was not nearly the amount of wealth abounding at that time as there is today in this world and there has never been as much inequity between the distribution of that wealth as exists today. And that inequality is buying truths that simply are not true but may carry the day and become the truths of tomorrow if we are not careful as a nation and a people. The three headed troika of deregulation, small government and low taxes are truths among those who believe so passionately in them but they may become the central thesis that guides this nation and its government through much of the rest of this century. In point of fact, there are those who will tell you that this thesis has already won the day and we are in a rear guard action against their dominance now.

As we look back on the generation that guided this nation to its current greatness, as they pass from us, we might want to think about what they went through and what they forged for us to destroy either by our actions or our inactions in their defense. The greatest generation saw a great economic collapse and an even greater period of war in which their very closely held ideals were threatened by powers who were the true epitomization of evil on this earth. That forged in them the will to move forward to make this a better world expressed by things such as the Marshall Plan which rebuilt a Europe which once prayed so deeply to its God in times of hopelessness and now turns its back on him almost completely. It also created the space program and the manned moon launches to a place that we have not been back to in forty years. And it created the great prosperity that also thought that no person on this earth and especially in the United States should have to starve. And now all of that is going away as people who have never had to fight or starve or want have little or no pity for those who are so close to starvation on a daily basis that if it were not for the food programs and the soup kitchens that sustain them, they would die deaths not unlike those that the greatest generation encountered in the death camps at the close of World War Two that they so abhorred. And, these same people spout the special voice and tone of a religion and a faith that they do not bother to practice its tenants at all.

Faith, hope, love, and charity do not live in these people at all and they practice a treason against traditional morality that is so large and so gross that it does not appear to be what it is. They look upon those who have less and who are helpless against the world that they created out of their efficiencies as something that is unnecessary and expendable and not worth even the two mites that the poverty stricken woman put in the offering plate that Jesus so praised in the week before his betrayal and death. And, just perhaps, that is the real treason that none dare talk about. A government is dependent upon each generation to keep up the ideals that it was founded upon. And one of the iconic founding documents of this nation starts out by stating that “all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights.� And the treasonous among us take that “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness� and distort it into something that the founders would have not recognized at all. Forget the founders! Even what is left of the greatest generation cannot believe what has happened to what they fought so long and so hard against sometimes long odds to create,

IOVHO,

Regards,

Joe

To say that "God exists" is the greatest understatement ever made across space and time.