Don't shoot the messenger

Dear Editor:

Winston Churchill once said, "You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life." Never in a million years would I have imagined that standing up for freedom, the truth and our constitution, IN AMERICA, would be the very thing that brought the most animosity towards me. The most common thing whispered around town by members of the political establishment or shouted at me by their loyal minions is that I am crazy. Why is this? Firstly, I feel that by using an ad hominem (a verbal attack on the speaker rather than the argument) the person doesn't have to expose his weak or non-existing argument to someone who is more informed. He can walk away without having to change himself especially when his occupation and/or belief system is based on a lie. Dr. Wayne Dyer is quoted as saying "The ultimate ignorance is the rejection of something you know nothing about and refuse to investigate."

I've also been told people think I am going to be the next Arizona gunman! Why all the irrational fear people? All I am doing is questioning what most of you hear on your squawk boxes and take as the gospel. James Madison warned, "If tyranny and oppression come to this land it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy." Sound familiar?

The truth is very hard to look at so I do understand. However, until Americans break out of their trances, start living like free men and women, and begin taking their liberties back, solutions to fix our very severe problems will never take place. It takes more than a few politicians who seem like good guys to clean up this mess, it takes an informed citizenry. Ghandi stated, "No one saves us but ourselves. No one can and no one may."

Secondly, I feel because people like me (and the growing number of us) who don't drink the same Kool-Aid as everyone else and actually go above and beyond to research why this great experiment in freedom is failing are labeled "crazy" or "extreme" is because our findings don't match the official story being drilled into the heads of the majority. Keep in mind, the majority gets its information from the corporate controlled media or its favorite local politician who has it all under control. In the meantime, we have lost our prosperity, property rights and freedom to a system that has been rigged against us. But the majority of people are too distracted by the big game, his/her next night out on the town or trying to make ends meet to notice. The truth is, your life is being controlled by someone other than you and the thought of taking personal responsibility for yourself and your actions is daunting. So you lash out at the first person who comes along and tries to tell you of the danger you are in if you do not wake up. "In the beginning of change the patriot is a scarce man. Brave, hated and scorned. When his cause succeeds, the timid join him, for then it costs nothing to be a patriot." ~Mark Twain

The bitter pill to swallow is that our once free country is being destroyed from within and our lives and freedoms are in danger. Our treasury has been looted by the bankers and Wall Street, people are losing their homes and we are now cheering on assassinations of US citizens with no trial. Our morality as a society has all but disappeared and socialism is being trumpeted as the saving grace to the vices of capitalism (never mind the fact that free market capitalism hasn't existed in this country for over a hundred years). Useful idiot was the term invented in Soviet Russia for people who blindly supported the likes of Lenin and Stalin as they committed atrocity after atrocity. The signs of a collapsing society are all around us, yet the people ushering in the crisis want you to think they have it under control as they make your decisions for you. Like the one a few weeks ago in Wisconsin where Judge Fiedler ruled the Zinnicker family has "No inherent right to own a cow or consume its milk." In closing Aristotle philosophized, "Anyone can become angry-that is easy, but to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way-that is not easy.

Gene Duffy

Jim Thorpe