The Cost in Blood

For many years I thought of myself as a Jeffersonian. I have always admired the words he left for us to read, ponder, and follow. It is hard to come up with any other name that so engenders the values on which America is founded. The Declaration of Independence, the Preamble to the Constitution, and the Constitution itself are written in such a way as to not only put forth, but enshrine the concepts that give this nation its great potential as a fount of humane generosity and opportunity.

But in recent years I have become less enamored of Mr. Jefferson. Yes, his words are great and beautiful, and he still inspires thoughts of national grandeur, but remembering that actions speak louder that words and looking at the way he lived leads ultimately to the conclusion that he was, more than anything, the ultimate politician. He was a man of his times who knew exactly what to say to describe the highest ideals of those times, but when it came to daily life, those ideals took a back seat to his desires. In short, he was a great man but perhaps a little too human to be a hero.

As the years have passed for me, I have become more and more an admirer of another notable early American, Ben Franklin. Less flamboyantly verbose, more pragmatic, and much more plebian than Jefferson, Franklin was no less influential in those revolutionary times and definitely more politically effective. In reading a biography of Franklin, I recently came across a statement of his that cemented my hero worship for him in stone.

“All wars are follies,” he wrote, “very expensive, and very mischievous ones. When will mankind be convinced of this, and agree to settle their differences by arbitration? Were they to do it, even by the cast of a die, it would be better than by fighting and destroying each other.”

At another time, he brought it all down to one line, “There was never a good war, or a bad peace.” Not entirely true, of course, ala Neville Chamberlain, but 99.9% true is good enough for me.

Combine the words and actions of Jefferson and Franklin, and you have a pretty good synopsis of the core of American philosophy. Franklin was a pragmatic diplomat who, in spite of his distaste for war, spent the entirety of the American Revolution, negotiating for the recognition of the colonies as an independent entity and ultimately negotiated the peace with Britain that ended the war. At the same time he played a strong role in shaping the treaty that ended the war between France and Britain.

Franklin’s deal with Britain failed to bring Canada into the U.S., but established the western boundary of the United States at the Mississippi River. It was Jefferson who more than doubled those lands through the Louisiana Purchase which ultimately led to the Doctrine of Manifest Destiny and formed the basis of what is still today our national character – the idea that we have some god-given right to whatever we want.

The great flaw lies in our mutation into a nation of individuals each of whom seeks the maximum amount of material wealth. We one-up each other and the rest of the world to death.

We see it today in the wild promises of our presidential candidates. As the excellent lead article in today’s New-Leader Nation/World section points out, no candidate running for president today is putting forward a plan that can be achieved under our present budgetary structure.

We are all excited about having a new president with a new way of looking at things who will lead us to new heights of material wealth and personal comfort.

Perhaps we should consider becoming a nation of people who seek not to have a better house than their neighbor but to ensure that their neighbor does not have to live in a lesser house. Perhaps we should consider becoming a nation of people more concerned with relieving the poverty most of the world’s nations face than with being able to buy cheap shirts. Perhaps we should consider becoming a nation of people willing to put more money into domestic social programs than into weapons and impossible defense systems. Perhaps we should consider becoming a nation who believes that the blood of other people is as valuable as our own.

Perhaps we should consider becoming a people who remember that there is no such thing as a bad peace so long as that peace is not purchased at the cost of other people’s blood.



Be the change you wish to see in the world. -- M. K. Gandhi

Individually we have little voice. Collectively we cannot be ignored.
But in silence we surrender our power. Yours in Peace -- BR

The reason for going was to keep the crude flowing and raise a false flag abroad. – from a poem by Jack Evans titled 3500 Souls - http://www.myspace.com/paralegal_eagle