I found this excellent Letter to the Editor in an online edition of a Tennessee newspaper. The 4th of July is behind us, but the message contained in the words and deeds of the Founding Fathers is the same every day--- be visionaries and doers, have a passion for freedom, and work to protect and preserve freedom for future generations.
To the Editor:
America's Founding Fathers were doers. They collectively identified a problem, labored as a whole to devise a course of action and executed a plan to set America on a path to real freedom.
Nearly 250 years later, we still commend their spirit, laud their documents, and allude to their wisdom and foresight. Sadly, very few Americans today have much in common with those visionaries. We've become a population of watchers, voyeurs to our own existence and our nation's future.
We've come to expect that politicians will lie, that corporations are fueled by greed, that corruption is simply the way the game is played and there isn't anything we're ever going to do about it.
We've rationalized our discontent with jokes and the occasional snort. In our truly indignant moments we may even mutter "someone should do something." But "someone" won't be us because we're too busy, too tired, too this and too that. We have an inexhaustible supply of excuses that allow us to continue watching.
We have people who are happy to tell us what to think, what it means, why we should, why we shouldn't, and what's best for us. By letting them deal with those things that would require our time and energy to address, we can go on watching.
This Fourth of July, amidst all the hoopla of processed patriotism, we'll hear many references to our Founding Fathers. I wonder where we'd be today if those great men had been watchers instead of doers?
Mark Wehner
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