Kort Explores conundrums of the human condition

What I find most disturbing about the disaster in New Orleans is the pervasive lack of self-reliance. It isn't like floods along the Mississippi River are a rare occurrence. But in past floods, the traditional first response of the threatened local population has been to grab shovels, buckets, building debris, arm loads of rocks, whatever was at hand, and head for the breach in the levee. The first priority was recognized to be the need to stop further flooding and damage as quickly as possible.

A disturbingly predictable response to the WTC attacks has been the rush to exploit the mass media driven hysteria to vastly expand the power and scope of intrusive government. Congress has abandoned even its usual pretense of purpose with its passage of the massive new "anti-terrorism" bill.

Magicians have long known how useful it can be to distract the attention of the audience away from what they're really doing. Unfortunately, so have politicians and propagandists. The magnitude of real crimes that the American public is willing to overlook when distracted by a sordid sex scandal, or a soap opera spun around a doe-eyed child, is simply amazing.

Earlier in this century the light of freedom was extinguished over much of Europe and Asia, and only flickered tenuously in much of the rest of the world. Fortunately for us who came later, those living at the time were willing to risk a heavy price to restore the light of freedom. Many of those who believed in freedom paid the ultimate price of sacrificing their lives in the struggle to defeat tyrants and restore the freedom they'd destroyed.

"On every question of construction (of the Constitution) let us carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested in the debates, and instead of trying what meaning may be squeezed out of the text, or invented against it, conform to the probable one in which it was passed."
Thomas Jefferson

Fifty years after their last major effort to destroy freedom in the United States, the Japanese have launched another aggressive assault on the constitutional rights of American citizens. This time the danger of the Japanese assault has been enhanced by the active support, or at least the complicity of shared interests, of the many national governments around the world who have already succeeded in stripping their citizens of their individual rights.

Any citizen with even the slightest affection for his liberty and freedom should be alarmed. On 12/30/96, President Clinton declared himself to be the ultimate power in the land - superior even to the electorate. Perhaps even more disturbing than the proclamation itself is the total lack of understanding by the mainstream newsmedia of this critically significant change in American politics.

In my opinion, President Clinton and the gang of thieves, murderers, and assorted scoundrels that surround him were until recently the greatest threat to liberty in American politics. To my distress, I now recognize that there is an even greater threat to our future looming on the horizon.

The liberal elite has defended and even promoted the right of citizens to desecrate our flag, since our flag "only" represents the principles on which our nation was originally formed, and which too many real Americans have had to pay with their lives to defend. The liberal elite has done everything it can to depreciate and ridicule those principles that formerly provided the foundation on which the greatness of our nation was built.

Imagine being summoned before an arrogant government official and being told that as a result of accusations you would not be allowed to see, the official was going to involve herself in your life. The official was going to impose arbitrary restrictions on your freedom of association, make changes in your work environment that imposed intolerable conditions and forced you to resign your job, and would put things in your official records that would continue to follow you and cause you grief for years to come.