Well we all just have celebrated another Fourth Of July holiday. Its a festive day, one in which guys dressed in eighteenth century get-ups try to sell us mattresses and used cars at Amazing Discounts! to show how patriotic they are. But what is the holiday really about? Is this blood-stained, imperialist, capitalist legacy really something we should be bragging about or should we hang our heads in shame? What obligation do we have to admire and laud fifty-eight slaveowning capitalists as they started a bloody war against a government which clearly had the best interests of the people at heart.
Why did these troublemakers rise up against their legally instituted rulers? They were rich guys who didnt want to pay their fair share of taxes, thats why! They upholstered their selfish greed with a lot of guff about 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness' and 'natural rights' but the bottom line was all about cash, dinero, rubles. We can look back and laugh at the tax rates these guys went to war over too. If some politician today proposed that a government run on such an insanely low percentage of the GNP as the self-centered Colonials paid they would be strapped into a straight-jacket and shipped off to a looney bin. We're happy to devote fifty or sixty percent of our earnings to federal, state and local taxes; how else would we know what kind of light bulbs to use and who would fund the Lawrence Welk Museum in Kansas if not us enlightened taxpayers? The money for a 'Bridge To Nowhere' has to come from Somewhere, doesnt it? We like high taxes so much that we're about to elect people who have been protesting the current 'low' tax rates for the last six years and are blaming all our economic woes on them.
When you look at those redneck Founding Fathers, clinging to their God and their guns like the militia-style lunatics that they were you have to think about the brutal and reactionary past which led them to their assault on proper authority. These fascists admired 'The Pilgrims', a pack of land-grabbing, sexually hung-up homophobes whose motto was 'He who does not work, shall not eat'. What a naked statement of genocidal intent against the poor! In these more enlightened times we know better; he who does not work should apply for Food Stamps and turn his absentee ballot over to the Democrats, is a much better adage, one that furthers the march towards Justice.
Does that 'Declaration' include anything about the Right to Free Health Care? How about justice for Gay people who want to exchange marriage vows? The right to low-priced gasoline? They left those rights for progressive judges to discover two centuries later in our 'Living Constitution'.
Another thing that these maniacs were against was an economy that was very wisely regulated by proper authorities who were far enough from the scene to see the big picture and who had a healthy contempt for capitalism and profits. Green policies which discouraged polluting local industries and prevented virgin, pristine wilderness from being destroyed and turned over to agri-business were fought at every turn by these 'pioneers', whose ignorance and cultural insensitivity to our Native American's traditions of tribal war and kidnapping wives and children were responded to with ethnic cleansing campaigns on the part of the 'settlers'. And what about 'The Boston Tea Party', where tons of tea owned by a legally chartered government monopoly were destroyed by vandals who wanted to implement anti-worker, anti- union 'Free Trade' policies of the sort pushed by the radical instigator Adam Smith.
The only bright spot in this picture is how much we've grown as a nation. We love tax rates that are higher than the ones paid by serfs in the Middle Ages. We live our lives in accordance to government guidelines and regulations designed to fix the weather, we understand that the well-being of the collective is more important than some mythical 'natural rights' which accrue to the individual for no good reason. We've knocked off all that Supreme Being crap and have a healthy regard for the Rights Of The Victims; those who through no fault of their own havent gotten their slice of the American Dream, whether it be because of racism, bad luck or lack of documents showing that they are in this country legally. A New Age is about to dawn! Change is just around the corner! Yes We Can!
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