A quotation from that radical left-wing liberal, Ben Franklin, has been bouncing around in the padded cell of my head. You remember him from school, the nutcase famous for flying kites in thunderstorms.

It must have been that day's equivalent of pegging the speedometer on the Thompson Flat. Something really unwise, but somebody's got to do it just because it's there to be done.

The same Ben Franklin as the one on our money is recorded to have said in 1759, "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."

Note the date, seventeen years before 1776. He was one of the people who risked everything in defiance of right-wing militarist authorities bent on crushing the democracy movement, like in China now.

People from everyplace in the world once dreamed of going to America where a man's worth was determined by the man himself, not his bloodline. That didn't work out too well with the Anglos claiming the land as their own and naming all others qualified Americans; African-American, Mexican-American, Asian-American. Discrimination by bloodline is exactly what our forefathers rebelled against in their young hothead years.

It turns out real democratization is a long-term process. It's an ideal in the beginning, a dream, something to live for and work toward. We are still in the process of creating democracy. It's our country's spiritual path.

The goal was established in the Constitution and we are still working toward it, though I don't know about the word "working" any more. It's looking like after a few hundred years it gets taken for granted as if it had finished evolving and become permanent.

I hope I am misreading what I see, but it looks like the American people are tired of the responsibilities democracy requires. I'm thinking of how quickly the people of Hong Kong adjusted in their transition from democracy to militarist rule from the mainland with no more than a whimper. A little flame of quiet protest at first was easy to put out, then acquiescence by TV light.

Our so called leaders, the heirs of the Reagan Revolution, literally placed in office by the Reagan-Bush Supreme Court, are appointing a stiff for Homeland Security Czar, or whatever they call it. A Linda Tripp style makeover could make him resemble even more authentically another great fascist in American history, J. Edgar Hoover.

After 50 years of television there's barely a whisper of complaint. Security is what we want for more television, more money, more gas, more distractions from reality and more isolation from the rest of he world. The Reagan Revolution put an end to the search for alternative forms of generating energy independent of the Texas Oil Cartel. TOC. Short for toxic.

The way I read it the American people don't want to make decisions having to do with how we are governed any more. Turning our government over to the Fortune 500 has a tremendous potential to eliminate political democracy without recourse, if it hasn't already. Corporate power structure is not democratic. It is based in militarist hierarchy.

The corporate mind does not think democratically any way you look at it.

We are now staring directly in the face of the legacy of the Reagan Revolution, the anti-Roosevelt era of taking from the people who work for a living and giving to the rich, blatantly and proud of it with a too-bad-if-you-don't-like-it attitude.

I mourn the willful letting go of democracy by the American people, half of whom decline to vote, the same as I mourn the letting go of literacy by willful illiteracy. Democracy and learning go hand in glove.

Placement of the loser in the White House by the bank should have been our wake-up call, but we shrugged it off, because we're afraid of the bank. After half a century of mind-numbing television, democracy, which is more vulnerable than we think when we don't think about it, appears to me to be in crisis.

Now we're a year into another wake-up call.

The professed purpose of the anti-American Islamists is to destroy our freedom and democracy by creating in us such unreasonable fear that we will resort to militarist rule, which we see unfolding every day in the news.

I remember the wave of compassion that swept over this entire nation in one day, over all the world even. It told me we are a caring people, not an afraid people. While we still have the power of one vote apiece and still care, my personal appeal in this memorial time for the slaughter of innocents, our national innocence, is vote.

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