This reflection is entitled...

The Last Throes of Democracy

For the first time since I can remember I feel no sense of patriotism today ~

I feel no need to watch the parades.

I feel no need to display the flag.

I feel no need to celebrate our independence.

I feel instead a sense of chagrin that our proud flag and democracy has been soiled and shamed.

Soiled and shamed by an administration that has masked its illegal and corrupt war and occupation of Iraq with yellow ribbons and shameful lies.

Yes, I feel instead a deep sadness that I am experiencing the last throes of Democracy.

We have obviously forgotten the words of Thomas Paine:

Never had a country so many openings to happiness as this. Her setting out in life, like the rising of a fair morning, was unclouded and promising. Her cause was good. Her principles just and liberal . Her temper serene and firm. Her conduct regulated by the nicest steps, and everything about her wore the mark of honor . It is not every country that can boast so fair an origin.

We have also forgotten the words of Patrich Henry:

America has lighted a candle to all the world .

And we have forgotten the words of Benjamin Franklin:

Wise and good men are, in my opinion, the strength of the state ~ much more so than riches and arms .

Financial Times columnist Anatol Lieven,and author of America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism warns that the U.S. polity is turning its back on the civic patriotism of the "American Creed" of liberty, the rule of law, and political egalitarianism in favor of an "American antithesis," a radical and vengeful nationalism that recalls the worst tendencies, and mistakes, of Wilhelmine Germany just before World War I.

Retired Army Col. Andrew Bacevich, author of The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War contends that the country's recent love affair with force and exaltation of the soldier threaten both the military institution, as policymakers expect it to solve ever more problems, but also the republican ideals on which the U.S. was founded.

And what were those ideals on which we were founded ?

The purpose, quite simply, of the the signers of the Declaration of Independence 229 years ago was to protect the inalienable rights of human beings to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness or Live and let live .

This administration has traded away many of those rights for a false security, greed and economic gain ~ all under the guise of freedom and democracy.

If I raised a flag today ~ it would be at half mast .

For we are, indeed, in the last throes of Democracy.

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