Here's John Silber's commentary on Kipling's Gods of the Copybook Headings, via LL:
If we have the courage to face reality, we will know and proclaim these harrowing truths: that the degenerate society consumed in pleasure-seeking will not survive (“the wages of sin is death”), that the society that will not defend its freedom will lose it (“stick to the Devil you know”), that a society that consumes more than it produces will go bankrupt (“if you don’t work, you die”). We ill serve ourselves and our children by preparing ourselves and them for a life of freedom and easy living that may never come and most certainly will never last. We had better prepare ourselves and them for reality—a reality that is infused with moral laws as surely as it is infused with physical laws; a reality in which there is no consumption without production, no freedom without defense, no self-fulfillment and no self-government without self-disciplined persons who govern themselves, persons who are capable of subordinating their desires long enough to achieve the conditions on which freedom and survival, and even pleasure, depend.
Never Forget,
LSP
8 comments:
Those who fail to read history are doomed to repeat it.
Never forget.
The second worst attack on our democracy😉
LL said...
Those who fail to read history are doomed to repeat it.
Those who do read history are frustrated watching those who don't, but are 'in charge'.
Ain't that the truth, LL. And what genius patrol's responsible for turning History into Social Studies in our schools?
Oh yes, Herr Doktor, and we all know the third.
That, WSF, seems to be the case. And what about the people who do but just don't care? That last aspect terrifies me.
I believe the people in charge know full well what they're doing. It's a feature, not a defect of their plan.
Never will forget it.
Also never will forget it was the Clintons and Gore who stopped intelligence agencies from sharing information, who turned the hunt for international terrorists into a Keystone Kops episode of law enforcement, who refused to prosecute the first WTC bombers, who allowed known intelligence that something was up to be hidden from the incoming president and who, on national tv, said outloud that we (the US of A) were listening in on Osama's phone calls to his grand mama and thus were able to pinpoint his location (and we were also tracking his medications...)
Oh, yeah, and it was the Clintons who stood down fighters in the US from being armed and ready to intercept at a moment's notice. So the pilots flying to intercept Plane #4 were unarmed and were prepared to ram Plane #4.
Don't forget. Don't forget how the Congress turned the Patriot Act from good ideas to open mining of all information on everyone and the idea of TSA into Thousands Standing Around.
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