A Dixie Carpetbagger

I’m still around.  I’ve just been stuck in my house, with tons of classwork to do… mostly SQL work.

On the plus side, I now understand this comic.

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” – George Santayana

“How monotonously alike all the great tyrants and conquerors have been: how gloriously different are the saints.” – C. S. Lewis

Breda comments on the fact that recent events seem to be almost miraculous, but also fated to happen. Simply put, when a person is ignorant of history, their path is set. No matter how many turns they take, no matter how their pace changes… their endpoint is marked, and the only variable is how long it takes to get there.

To those of us who know their history, the path is clear… to quote Gator in the comments of Breda’s post: “now go back and re-read the first couple of paragraphs of the Declaration of Independence. It’ll make the hair on the back of your neck stand up.”

We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness—-That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute a new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient Causes; and accordingly all Experience hath shewn, that Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while Evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the Forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long Train of Abuses and Usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a Design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their Right, it is their Duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future Security. Such has been the patient Sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the Necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government.

With a few changes, the list of grievances could’ve been written yesterday.  One line stands out, due to the fact that it rings so true now.  “In every stage of these Oppressions we have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble Terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated Injury. A Prince, whose Character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the Ruler of a free People.”

I think that the Founders knew that they were effecting history, and even the very patterns of future events.  Hopefully, we work under a rising, and not a setting sun.

Via Tam, a “news” post from an Indiana student newspaper. Said post reads like the writer was coming off a weekend bender, and was stuck between the “I’m so awesome” and “I’m gonna beat you” stages.

Run-on sentences, spelling errors, words that seem to be used to add punch or power to the piece, and a few pronoun association errors occur. This, from a writer for the student newspaper. I thought the student newspaper from my university was bad, but while most of the writing is drivel, it’s readable drivel. (The worst I’ve seen was the opinion piece that said that the tea parties needed to shut up, because we still had freedom… to go to Hooters, get drunk, and watch football. This was from a graduate student… from Vermont. He’s also an African-American.)

All of my writing classes have been taught by professors who held doctorate degrees, and any one of them would cringe at reading this article. As an example of how stringent grading is at my university, of my last two twenty-plus-page writing assignments, one was dead on, and the other had two errors- a spelling error and a pronoun association error in the preface. Both errors deducted two points; make six in twenty pages errors, and you make a “B”. I think my professor would have beaten this student writer with his keyboard for producing such low quality work.