Know Your History Before You Write

Dear Editor:

It is amazing, quite often, that letters appearing in the Lake Charles American Press are from people professing to know the history of this country, but in actuality have no idea what our early presidents and their compatriots wrote and spoke about during the founding of the United States of America. They either don’t know or don’t want to know truth, but rather to spout the propaganda and self serving babble of despots and bigots. So much has been claimed along these lines by the current administration and their minions (i.e. Dick Cheney, Rush Limbaugh, Senate Majority Leader Frist, Tom Delay, and Anne Coulter), in their drive to push their own faith based religious control of our government, silence negative criticism, and skirt protection granted to all Americans in the Bill of Rights.

Revolutionary constitution writers regarded the Bill of Rights as a necessary means of defending liberty against relentlessly aggressive governmental-especially executive power. Perhaps President John Adams, who had a hand in writing and approving the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, said it best when he wrote, “The president is not to advance the fortunes of one section, not to represent a single social and economic class, and not to be the advocate for any narrow factional interest. His objective must be to protect the nation against avarice, ambition, and passion, and in the pursuit of those ends.” What would he have said about a tax cut benefiting mainly the wealthiest of our country?

And what would President James Madison have thought about one party having control of all three branches of our national government? He said, “The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands….may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.” Or how about Benjamin Franklin, a Deist, who said, “Those who give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” He also wrote, “Most men, indeed as well as most sects in religion, think themselves in possession of all truth, and that wherever others differ from them, it is so far error.” This was followed by, “A man compounded of law and gospel is able to cheat a whole country with his religion and then destroy them under color of law.”

The early settlers of America left Europe, mainly England, because of religious persecution, and made it possible for the writer of the Declaration of Independence, (President) Thomas Jefferson, a Deist, to predict that because so many Europeans had acquired American Bond Securities, that money would be sucked from the United States, leaving many of its citizens faced with penury. Our current trade deficit, tax cuts for the wealthiest, and wild deficit spending by the administration bears that prediction out. The gap between the richest and poorest of this country is growing. And, we almost have a mortgage on our country held by China, Japan, and oil rich totalitarian governments around the globe.

Even Republican President Herbert Hoover in a September 1932 speech spoke on the subject when he said, “As our problems grow so do our temptations grow to venture away from those principles upon which our republic was founded and upon which it has grown to greatness….We have opposed the distortion of these works into pork-barrel nonproductive works which impoverish the Nation….It is through lower expenditures that we get lower taxes.” It is a shame that the President, Congress, and their supporters, including our local letter writers, cannot understand that thinking,