This month we celebrated July 4, the day of the year when we remember the anniversary of the founding of our republic by those bold men that we speak of reverently as our “Founding Fathers,” men like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, Benjamin Franklin and so many others who rose up against British oppression and declared that the colonies of America were free from British rule and governance from that day forward.

I remember that some of the outrageous things that the British tyrants were doing was searching the homes of the colonists without having good reason — in other words, they were snooping on the people without good cause. But the main thing that provoked the radical “patriots” of that bygone era was that the British were taxing the colonists without allowing them to be represented in the legislature. This provoked the “patriots” of Boston to dress up like “Native Americans” and toss the valuable cargo of a British merchant ship into Boston Harbor in an event that came to be known as the “Boston Tea Party.”

The thing that I find so terribly ironic is that if men like the founding fathers were alive today and had the same ideals and used the same tactics against our government, they would be prosecuted under a law enacted under Mr. George W. Bush’s administration called the “Patriot Act” and would most likely be imprisoned as subversive for doing the very things they did back in the 18th century against the British.

Someone will say that these men now have a chance to elect representatives to vote so that the government can reflect their views, and they certainly do not have to resort to violence as they did during the Boston Massacre. However, the truth is that the electorate in America today is so completely uneducated and uneducable that the American electorate is led blindly by the corporate interests who have the resources to control the mass media, particularly the medium of television.

The founders of this nation were thinkers, philosophers, students of both government and human nature. They knew that when the average man lays his hands on anything it will soon be in a mess, so they set strict requirements for having the right to vote. The reason was that they did not want the people to be like dumb sheep who were easily misled by those who twist the truth and tell outright lies. Those safeguards have now been systematically removed over the decades so that people who do not know their right hand from their left are choosing our elected officials.

Furthermore, if the founding fathers were alive today, they would be scandalized to see what is done by our own government in the way of surveillance, searches, and seizures. Indeed, most, if not all of the founders of this nation would be imprisoned by our government because they were deemed to be a threat to our society under the “Patriot Act.” What a huge irony!

The real patriots that we have venerated for years are treasonous villains because they violate Mr. Bush’s Patriot Act. It seems that we have voted a monstrous law upon ourselves to protect ourselves from ourselves. If I could, I’d offer a solution, but I don’t know what it would be. All I know is that what we have is working pretty poorly.

 

William Johnson

Natchez resident