Lowell Ponte - July 4, 2001
Reading Jefferson’s words on a hot, sticky night on the week of the Fourth of July, I felt sleep overtaking me. In what might have been a dream, I found myself watching the Founding Fathers as they prepared and began a revolution against the British rulers. But something had changed. History had frame-shifted by three centuries, and now their revolution was happening not in the year 1776 but in 2076 in a brave, new world full of modern technologies and laws that have emerged.
I watched a small group of the Founders, wearing Tee shirts and track shoes, gathered in an air-conditioned Philadelphia basement. I recognized Washington, despite his healthy teeth, and Jefferson and the others without their powdered wigs. But where was John Adams, whose urging had made Jefferson the Declaration’s drafter, celebrated today in David McCullough’s best-selling biography?
"The British detected Adams’ rebellious traits in kindergarten, using psychological tests for anti-social tendencies," a ghostly spirit at my side explained. "He was given tranquilizers and sensitivity training at age five that cured his politically-incorrect anti-monarchist tendencies, and the same happened with his firebrand cousin Sam Adams. They both now love and support King George III."
"And John’s wife Abigail was arrested at Boston’s Logan Airport. She tried to avoid surveillance by dressing like a man – but since the 1990s, security scanners have allowed government agents to look completely through unsuspecting men’s, women’s, and children’s clothing down to their genitalia, and Abigail did not have male genitalia. She also bought a ticket with cash, something that brings instant government surveillance. She, too, now loves the King."
And where, I asked, is John Hancock, who boasted of penning his name so large on the Declaration of Independence that the king could easily read it? "Surveillance cameras using artificial intelligence programming identified him despite his Indian disguise at the Boston Tea Party – the same kind of surveillance cameras used in parts of London as early as 2001," the spirit said. "Hancock and his Sons of Liberty were convicted of violating the environmental laws by polluting Boston Harbor with tea. Their properties and fortunes were confiscated under asset forfeiture laws, and they too all received appropriate sensitivity training and brain-adjusting medication."
Was Paul Revere among those arrested? "Of course," replied my mysterious companion. "And the British were able to use agents provocateurs and a phony telephone call to trick the farmers of Lexington and Concord into bringing their guns out of hiding to confront the Redcoats sent to seize their gunpowder. But, of course, the colonists had the new legally-required ‘safer’ guns that could be ‘fired only by their owners’ – you know, the type with computer circuitry inside. So when the colonists aimed them at British commandos, the Redcoats merely switched on a jamming device that turned off all the American guns from a distance and made them useless. The farmers were chained and sent to psychiatric hospitals for pain-compliance training and neural re-channeling, but most remain in prison for violating the Universal Peoples Firearms and All Other Weapons Confiscation Act of 2013 signed by President Hillary Clinton."
Where, I asked, is Alexander Hamilton? "The King’s ‘Echelon’ system monitoring of all telephone calls that uses computer pattern-recognition to detect key words identified Hamilton as a dangerous terrorist against the Crown," answered the strangely-ethereal voice. "He tried to flee, but the Global Positioning Satellite transponders in his car with names like LoJack and OnStar, and implanted in infancy under his skin, made Hamilton easy for the government to track."
"And you know the computer circuits built into cars since 1987," my guide continued, "supposedly to improve gas mileage? When Hamilton drove across a control web beneath the roadway – the kind the U.S. has at border crossings like that between San Diego and Tijuana since the 1990s – the Royal police simply activated an electromagnetic pulse from the web that turned off his car’s motor. When Hamilton tried to run, he was stopped with a cloud of soma vapor and a tranquilizer dart. He now serves the King too."
Did the same, I nervously asked, happen to George Mason of Virginia? "He and many others in the subversive ‘Committees of Correspondence’ were identified and monitored by the King’s ‘Carnivore’ system that uses computers to scan all emails," said the spirit.
"And they were easy to track using ‘Fincen,’ the government’s secret system that since the 1990s has recorded all citizen financial transactions and credit purchases, whenever they used any credit card. Those who tried to evade such monitoring by using cash were reported to the drug authorities, as all laws now require. And the cash itself now has those secret electronic tracking strips that let the King know whatever hands it passes through by requiring merchants and banks to scan all bills bigger than $5 into a Fincen-linked device. The royal government is also thus able to block any credit card or declare any currency counterfeit as a way of leaving rebels unable to buy anything such as food or fuel or airline tickets.
Where, I trembled to ask, is Benjamin Franklin. "He published politically incorrect things in his Poor Richard’s Almanack, advising men to take an old or unattractive mistress if they wished to be happy and such," said the ghostly shade. "He was accordingly sued for hate speech under the Sensitivity Laws. A jury of older citizens found him Not Guilty, accepting his argument that the laws protected free speech rights. But when he resumed publication, the government filed billions of dollars in nuisance lawsuits that bankrupted him."
"When Franklin continued to make insensitive remarks in public," the ghostly guide continued, "a mob urged on by Al Sharpton chased him into a building and set it on fire. Ben Franklin died in the blaze, and the government refuses to arrest any who were in the mob. You’ll remember that beginning in the 1990s the government simply killed those it found too distasteful. Tom Paine met the same fate. Like the mythical James Bond, 007, government agents such as Lon Horiuchi have been licensed to kill any approved target without fear of being tried or convicted. Pamphleteer Tom Paine was imprisoned, put into solitary confinement, and died of a mysterious heart attack – exactly like the witness against Bill Clinton named James McDougal."
So the only ones left to fight for America’s freedom, I asked, are the handful in this room? "They will soon be arrested too," said the shade. "Their cell phone calls are routinely recorded by the government, the same imperial government that prohibited the manufacture of encrypted cell phones – and that in 2000 required that future cell phones include a chip so that the secret police can zero in on its exact location using satellite surveillance and other means. Some will be killed by using targeted government radio commands to detonate the transponders implanted in their bodies. Even this room right now has secret royal bugging devices in it. The only question is whether the rebels will be punished under the royal laws or world government laws – not that these two are really different."
So does this mean, I asked, that the American Revolution will be killed in its cradle, that we will never be free? "From the moment Bill Clinton became Governor of all the colonies," my guide replied, "international meetings at the highest levels with his cooperation began making and implementing 33-year plans to systematically remove all weapons, all privacy, and all power, mobility, property, wealth, and rights from individual citizens."
"Leftists support this transfer of power because they love big government and believe they will be the ones controlling it," the shade continued. "And many conservatives have also been tricked into supporting the loss of individual freedom in the name of the War on Drugs or other moral crusades. Let’s face facts, Lowell – as you once explained in a column, some European-style conservatives don’t like individual freedom or free market capitalism any more than socialists do."
So is freedom doomed? "On Planet Earth it is," said the shade grimly, "because too many people have become addicted to government handouts, the same kind they tell tourists not to feed to the bears in Yellowstone lest the creatures become unable to feed themselves. We no longer have many like America’s Founders, many of whom were the richest people in the colonies and could have led lives of ease, willing literally to risk their lives, fortunes, and sacred honors for freedom."
"But the smartest and most noble ones among us, the ones able to run the technology, are Libertarians and individualists," said the apparition. "Many of them are working for freedom so secretly that even the King’s spies are unaware."
"And on the Fourth of July 2176," the ghostly figure continued, "Libertarians and fellow freedom activists on Earth will activate a few concealed programs in Big Brother’s computers to neutralize his space warships. And their brothers and sisters on the red planet at the same moment will declare the Independence of the 13 Mars colonies. They will succeed and give humankind a rebirth of freedom on another New World."
Who are you, I asked my guide, and how do you know all this? "I am the Spirit of ’76," he said, fixing me with his steady, clear-eyed gaze. "And despite how often the tyrants and dictators, the kings and Stalins and Hitlers and Hillary Clintons have tried to kill me, I live forever in the hearts of every authentic human being. Freedom is sometimes eclipsed, and sometimes its children get lulled to sleep, but woe to the tyrants when it reawakens…."
I felt my body floating upwards, as if under water, then burst into a world where I could breathe again. I opened my eyes, surprised by the dawn’s early light shining into them. It was morning again in America, the morning of the Fourth of July.
This Independence Day night, the bombs are again bursting in air, and how symbolic it is that power-hungry politicians want no private citizens – but only the government – to control even the tiniest fireworks that represent America’s revolutionaries fighting against the king who had oppressed them. These politicians, of course, pretend they are taking our freedom to protect our safety – the path, as Franklin said, that leads to neither freedom nor safety – and that they are enslaving us "for the children."
On this sacred night, on the Fourth of July with lights in our eyes and a smell of gunpowder in our nostrils, we will again all be asking – some with more attention than others – the question with which our politically-incorrect National Anthem ends. "Oh, say, does that Star-Spangled Banner yet wave, o’er the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave?"
Does it? It's a question each generation must ask and answer anew, every 20 years or so. As Jefferson understood, each new generation is its own nation.
Government is a power-mad weed, and unless its tendency to grow is pruned back with each generation it will soon take over the entire public square and reduce human beings again to slaves and serfs – as it has nearly done at the dawn of the 21st Century, the third millennium.
The revolution each generation must fight need not be violent, Jefferson knew. His own election as America’s third President he called "the Revolution of 1800," as indeed it was. By then the nation was already running up a huge national debt, raising taxes, trading arms for hostages with the Barbary pirates, and jailing journalists and even congressmen under the Alien & Sedition Acts for the crime of criticizing the government of John Adams.
Jefferson reversed all those evils, and thanks to him we retain today at least a few vestiges and memories of liberty.
But many politicians are eager to remove every freedom you now enjoy and turn you into a slave on Big Government’s plantation. Every enlargement of government is paid for with more loss of your liberty, and every politician who seeks the expansion of government is your and your children’s mortal enemy.
"A little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical," Thomas Jefferson wrote in a personal letter to his protégé James Madison in 1787. "It is a medicine necessary for the sound health of government."
You were born with an inheritance of freedom purchased with the blood of those who risked and died to win it. Jefferson’s point is that such liberty must be cherished, honored, and asserted anew by each generation – or it will be taken from you, bit by bit, by those who love government more than you love liberty.
What are you prepared to do to shrink a federal government that has grown many times more taxing and oppressive than the government of King George III? As in my dream, the chains of your slavery are being forged right now in hundreds of surveillance and police state laws and activities. If this does not concern you, then sleep well. But get ready for the American Dream to become a nightmare.
Thomas Jefferson had a motto by which he lived his life: "Rebellion to Tyrants is Obedience to God." Think, pray, and act upon what freedom means during this special week, and have a happy Fourth of July.
http://www.dorunda.com/news2001.htm
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