What a Disappointment We Are to Our Founding Fathers

I sometimes imagine that, through some miracle of time travel, I am host to Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Merriwether Lewis, and William Clark. I know, it's a stretch. My apartment can hardly handle two people and a dog, much less four guests, but, hey, are my space constraints really the biggest obstacle to making this happen!

I wonder if anything these men would see in our society would give them pride that they had set this chain of events in motion. For the life of me, I cannot come up with one thing that they might appreciate.

Jefferson had envisioned a land of well-read, well-informed farmers. We are none of these three. We are the most poorly educated and poorly informed populace among the developed nations. Very few of us work the land. Jefferson's nemesis, Andrew Jackson, with his emphasis on banking, finance, and commerce, has won out over Jefferson's vision. With this Jacksonian triumph has come the stock market, commodities, and housing bubbles, as well as a great redistribution of wealth from the lower and middle classes to the ungodly wealthy.

Jefferson also was a strong believer in a free press, contending that if he had to choose between government and a free press, he'd choose the latter as it is far more important to the functioning of democracy. How horrified he would be with government collusion with corporations and corporations' stranglehold on information.

Thomas Paine, who would be a radical even today, would doubtless rail against Homeland Security, the military-industrial complex, the oil-spy-military-banking cabal, surveillance of all kinds, the trashing of the Constitution, an elite establishment that rules our government, and plans to scrap help for the elderly, the poor, and the sick. In "Rights of Man," which I recently read, Paine advocates for guaranteed retirement (Social Security), health care for those who can't afford it, and cutting the armed forces almost back to nothing. He strongly pushes for progressive taxes, i.e. taxing the rich heaviest and the poor not at all.

Lewis and Clark would be utterly despondent. How could all this vast, beautiful, untouched wilderness be gobbled up by hoardes of people, their structures, their vehicles, and their things in just 200 years? What a cancer humanity is to so utterly destroy paradise in such short order!

All four would find the lack of quiet unnerving, the poor quality of food and water outrageous, and the lack of civility and the overwhelming insanity of hyper-consumerism, materialism, selfishness, greed, and general unhappiness devastating to their psyches as they are to mine.

If these men ever do show up on my doorstep, I will keep them close by so that when they are beamed back to their time, I can go with them.