Marc Fisher - Shameful Bowing Before the Crown - washingtonpost.com:
Marc Fisher and Thomas Paine explain why Americans shouldn't care.
"In our country, all men are created equal. 'Exalting one man so greatly above the rest cannot be justified on the equal rights of nature,' Thomas Paine wrote in 'Common Sense,' the 46-page tract that called on colonial Americans to revolt.
Our revolution was not against King George III so much as the concept of the monarch, the notion that power and status are inherited from one generation to the next. Paine called this idea 'unwise, unjust, unnatural -- an insult and an imposition on posterity.'
Every word of Paine's booklet applies as much today as it did in 1776, when he warned that people who believe they are born to be in charge of others 'are early poisoned by importance. . . . The world they act in differs so materially from the world at large that they have but little opportunity of knowing its true interests.'"
Sunday, May 06, 2007
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