"Hold you in his arms, yeah, you can feel his disease..."
Over 60 years ago, Franklin Roosevelt articulated what he believed to be the four basic and necessary freedoms on which any civilization must be built:
...
"The first is freedom of speech and expression--
everywhere in the world.
"The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way--
everywhere in the world.
"The third is freedom from want--
which, translated into universal terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants-everywhere in the world.
"The fourth is freedom from fear--
which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor--anywhere in the world.
"That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called new order of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb."
A beautiful speech and a lovely sentiment, but I have always thought that there was fifth, vital freedom that Roosevelt missed: the Freedom from Ignorance.
Because backstopping tyranny, oppression and want, you will always find ignorance.
Dig deep enough into any cause retarding progress or straining to drag America from enlightenment back, back, back into a dark age and you will find a quote like this (from this NYT article on the ferocious, intractable and apparently incurable ignorance of Creationists) buried like a dagger in the heart of the issue:
...
In Gallup polls over the last 25 years, nearly half of American adults have consistently said they believe God created all living things in their present form, sometime in the last 10,000 years.
...
Chronic and willful ignorance is nothing less than a disease that is stunting and crippling our culture and needs to be treated as such. And now, at the dawn of the 21st Century, with more vast and complex bearing down on our world than at almost any other time in history, we can no longer afford the luxury of patiently waiting for the Pig People to start behaving like responsible citizens.
Because that's never gonna happen.
Instead, ask yourself how would we treat parents who made their children sleep with plague rats? A news media that encouraged Americans to play with medical waste? A political system that added botulism to our drinking water?
Well, people who raise their children to be proud carriers of ignorance
are child abusers.
People who run media empires that make their audience progressively more stupid
are criminals.
People who construct institutions to transmit their destructive religious, racial, and sexual superstitions on and on and on
are traitors to their species.
And it is high fucking time for us to stop being polite about it.
9 comments:
It's not the masses Drifty . . . it's the 1%.
How you gonna fuck with the 1%?
We did it once in the 60's/70's . . . but all that energy is dead as Kent State Students . . .
We GAVE the phucks 40 years of Contract On America and the PNAC.
We handed it to them, on a silver platter, with bread and meat for two. Only we weren't at the banquet Shady Grove My Little Love . . .
How you gonna beat the 1%?
You can't.
It all has to rot to hell, and crash down to nothing. Then, we start over . . . and there will be NO ethos left to make good as we'll all be phrellin tryin to survive lack of water, food and roaming evil let loose like it was the middle ages without the aristocracy . . . .
The stop being polite part, I'm with ya . . . long ago.
What's next?
Yes. No more polite. Count me in.
On the money as usual, Mr. Glass, but I must tell you: My quota of polite for those vermin expired DECADES ago...
And I thought I was just an MIB (mouthy Eye-talian beeeyatch) from long ago.
I've been shush shush shushed for years by even non-Pig People. The ones who, like yer Auntie Bertha, say: You get more flies with honey than vinegar, Little Fiery One.
And I've seen the Right-Wingtards use this Emily Post Pseudo Etiquette Book for the last 10 years. As in:
1. Why do you _____ have to be so foul-mouthed? (Fill In: liberals, progressives, women, bloggers, minorities, Old Hippies, satirists etc etc)
2. You'll never get anyone to listen to you if you show that kind of anger. If you use that kind of bad language.
It IS a way of stuffing a rag down FDR's and everyone's throat.
Hear! Hear! Driftglass. "It IS high fucking time for us to stop being polite about it."
I say let's give all them pearl-clutching hypocritical Pig People cardiac arrest. CLEAR! ZAAAAAP! 40 Gazillion Mega-Joules.
"This boy is ignorance, this girl is want, beware them both, but most of all beware this boy, for upon his brow is written the word 'doom' for all those who would deny their existence."
or something like Dickens, 1843
OMG, I just looked up this quote myself. Dickens spelled it out perfectly in "A Christmas Carol."
"This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased."
Great points, Driftglass.
For Freedom from Ignorance I like this image. Very timely and from Rockwell, too.
Your post is a thing of beauty as usual, dg.
A-motherfucking-men, my brother!
Driftglass,
You aren't going to win with atheism. You are God. So am I.
Aum Namah Shivaya.
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