4 July 2003

The widespread apathy concerning the passionate struggle for liberty is painted on America’s festive faces 227 years down the road. The initial concentration of revolutionary energy has become dilute having been spread so far and wide for such a long time. There is simply no way to perpetuate the ideal and ensure that education may promote the values of individual transcendence and innate distrust of government.

Just as the toys and materialistic consumerism have replaced the essential meaning of Christ’s birth in December, and the easter bunny has replaced the mystery of resurrection, so too has the waving of flags and the explosion of fireworks substituted for the thick concentrate which stand at the core of the American Revolution’s radical ideal liberty, individualism, religious freedom, absence of tyranny, as well as egalitarianism (there can be no egalitarianism where certain “executive” workers are compensated ten times and more than laborers).

Every “-ism” is a dilution of a human reality, purer and more profound. A mysterious phenomenon is a substantified with a general concept and a word, eg. “freedom,” “patriot” and so on, which stand for the original phenomenon and eventually take its place. This explains how children today celebrate the 4th of July not knowing, or comprehending the significance of the original mysterious events and phenomena which gave rise to the these traditions and concepts. Waving a flag comes to fulfill an original commitment to risking one’s own life and property in order to promote a reality which is embedded in the expression ‘liberty’.

At root, the fact of liberty has never been proven or demonstrated to exist, and requires an authentic act of faith in order to be a participant. To be ‘american’ means to participate in a type of civic religion with faith in these ideals as its proof.

St. Paul has written: “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the grasp of things as yet unseen.” Democracy (there is no such thing as a “national” democracy---it is the common legacy of free humanity, the sole possessors of the truths of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness---solely given by a transcendent God) is the object of a specific type of faith. Democracy does not exist outside of such faith. ‘America’ exists in two aspects: one, as an object of faith, the authentic individual participation in democracy, and the other aspect is material, it is the land, the states, the government. It is only in the former sense that America can claim to be ‘democratic’, and in the latter sense is no better than any other government, great or small, plunged in greed, public confessional rituals, conformity and enormous, overwhelming pride.

A great man once said: “Democracy cannot be handed down from father to son like property---it must be earned by each succeeding generation.” The plastic waving flags on the 4th of July, the misuse of words like patriot stripped bare of original significance in The Patriot Act, or even worse, Patriot Missile, such nihilistic metaphor use hides the original meaning of blood spilled for a transcendent ideal. The word ‘education’ likewise has been emptied of its original significance, whose buildings and rituals distill the spirit of slavery, surveillance and suspicion upon youth whose ideals are not formed, while depriving them of the clean milk of democratic ideals such as Plato, Emerson, Franklin, Jefferson, Whitman and Bob Dylan and others all set against government tyranny and Statism, in which the faith in democracy in The United States is presently immured and inundated.