Allison Bricker
It may not be televised but its participants will indeed be educated.
THE REGION, INDIANA – The desire which compels me to write and speak in strong opposition towards the oppressive expansion of the American government, whether under Democrats or Republicans, owes its genesis to the firm imploration by my mom that education does not end upon graduation, and instead must be a continual process throughout the course of one’s life. As it is often said, knowledge is power.
The illuminated truth, motivated by my infatuation with the founding of this Republic, came to me through the worn and sometimes crumbling pages of books, not the endless memorization and standardized testing advocated in government schools.
Unencumbered by whitewashed lesson plans and the sometimes-evident pro-statist bias of my teachers and administrators, the ability for me to sit and soak up the words of those dusty essays, journals, letters, and notes is in my opinion, one of humanity’s greatest accomplishments, id est. the Gutenberg Press.
The proliferation of movable-type in the colonies spurred forth the “Challenge of Ideas”, giving rise to the radical Questioning of the absurd notion that rule over mankind came from divinely appointed kings, queens or parliamentary superiority, the “central planners” of their day. Further, its unique place in our history whereby it aided the distribution of both Thomas Paine’s Common Sense and the Declaration of Independence, cements a fondness in my soul for both it and the enlightened distribution of information.
Unfortunately, the business of news, information, and debate had become increasingly consolidated during the course of the last 100 years. As government intervened into the market via absurd licensure schemes under the guise of promoting “fairness”, “public” ownership of the airwaves et cetera, its endless volumes of regulations succeeded only in raising barriers to entry and creating media oligarchies to the benefit of the state. Government sanctioned soap-boxes have proved mightily their efficient processing and packaging of news and information into simplified talking points, but at what cost?
The result of this corporate protectionist media racket; is to have given rise to the sound bite intellect, thereby imbuing legions of collectives charged with half the facts and all the passionate rhetoric once reserved for a Finney tent revival.
Yet we see throughout history that humanity’s yearning for information is as perpetual as a sunrise. Undiscouraged by the darkness, she eternally dawns over the horizon pushing back the shadows and nefarious K-Street deals that go bump in the night, providing her warmth and illumination to the dual pillars known as the trees of Liberty and Knowledge, which to the utter dismay of the D.C. pull-peddlers shan’t be felled.
Indeed the central authority’s arrogance will lead to its own most necessary undoing. Nevertheless fellow readers, windows do not remain in perpetuum. However, our patient suffering at the hands of the old-media spoon-feeders has in large part been relieved via the propagation of citizen journalists and institutions dedicated to the pursuit of Reason and human Liberty.
How many amongst us gave pause just a decade prior to entertain a contrary view on economics outside the Keynesian philosophy, which dominates the airwaves and halls of academia? Further, what is the rise in percentage of Americans who now know that the FEDERAL RESERVE is a private for-profit bank who charges interest to the government in exchange for loans collateralized by our and our posterity’s wages as opposed to just five years previous?
Whereby even just a decade past many swam in a sea of noise almost exclusively dominated by the 24-hour cable news cycle, perhaps unaware of what questions to even ask, let alone where to look, our present station finds us on the familiar yet long undisturbed grounds of our forbearers.
Americans today are questioning the answers like no time in recent memory. The floodgates of knowledge have burst open providing us the gift of distributed learning via wonderful institutions such as the Mises Foundation, which has its entire catalog available for the taking on iTunes university, free of charge. We the People are gathering under varied banners unified solely by dissatisfaction of government intrusion into all spheres of our lives.
The airwaves are humming with talks of finding Constitutional solutions to the present Crisis, such as the symposium being held by Mike Church in Washington tomorrow to discuss the possibility of a remedy at the hands of an Article V convention.
It makes me smile to know that despite the Central Authority’s best efforts to squeeze out dissent, the tighter they grasp, the more we awaken.
Long Live Liberty and let us raise a glass in celebration of the coming Second Age of Reason.
OFFICIAL STATEMENT – Amid much fanfare last week, the last supposed “combat” troops left Iraq as the administration touted the beginning of the end of the Iraq War and a change in the role of the United States in that country. Considering the continued public frustration with the war effort, and with the growing laundry list of broken promises, this was merely another one of the administration’s operations in political maneuvering and semantics in order to convince an increasingly war-weary public that the Iraq War is at last ending. However, military officials confirm that we are committed to intervention in that country for years to come, and our operations have in fact, changed minimally, if really at all. [TRANSCRIPT]
