Do we need leadership

In my last post I decried the very apparent lack of true leadership qualities in the Polidickheads who we've voted into office with metronomic regularity.

Now I ask the above question. Do we need leadership??

The American revolution against the relatively (compared to today) minor abuses of the colonists by the titular rulers in England was instigated by a minority (perhaps 30%) of the colonists who considered that they would not bow to those who would deny them the freedom to decide their own fate, or who told them that the state knew better than they what was good for them. Violating willy-nilly the very laws which citizens of England had secured by vigorous struggle hundreds of years before, rendering those laws inapplicable to the colonies.

So they fought, and won the defining struggle of their age, sparking short years later, in other countries, the same kinds of struggles.

Theirs was an age of thinkers. Unhampered by 24/7/365 noise from radio, TV, internet, and untold thousands of ad agencies telling them what they needed, they set out to establish a Republic, governed by laws, which supposedly would apply to all men equally. (we won't go into several of the hypocrisies in that last. Suffice it to say that we are still trying to overcome them)

These thinkers understood the differences between the Rule of Law and the Rule of the Mob. That's why we were given a Republic where the Rule of Law was supposed to be paramount.

But there is always a catch, it seems.

Alexis deTocqueville in his seminal work, Democracy In America written in the 1830s, believed that America’s version of democracy suffered from a fatal flaw, a flaw that derived from the American character itself.

DeToqueville observed that Americans had two conflicting desires: (1) The desire to be free, and (2) the desire to be led. It is America’s second desire that has now led to the undoing of the first.

Irrespective of America’s truly revolutionary Declaration of Independence and extraordinary Constitution, America today has become a debased mockery of the founding fathers’ original dream and the manifestation of DeToqueville’s dire predictions; and, this November, Americans will again go to the polls to choose “their masters”.

This is what DeToqueville said of the process:

It is in vain to summon a people, who have been rendered so dependent on the central power to choose from time to time the representatives of that power; this rare and brief exercise of their free choice, however important it may be, will not prevent them from gradually losing the faculties of thinking, feeling, and acting for themselves, and thus gradually falling below the level of humanity.

There are still may thinkers and doers in this country. The Internet acts as a forum to many of them. But, consider this. The media rails against the imposition of internet restrictions by China during the impending Olympics......and rightly so......but do little about the efforts by government here at home from trying to do the same.

Ultimately the free flow of information brought down the evil Empire of the old Soviet Union. Do you not think that our own rulers didn't see that and ponder the implications to themselves.

I am not saying Americans or others should not vote in elections; but, if they do, they should be cognizant of what they expect will be accomplished. Most Americans still hope their votes once every two or four years will correct the direction this once great nation has taken. They will not.

What will save us, if we are to be saved, is for free men and women to exercise their freedom, in all aspects of their lives, limiting, in as much as is possible in your own situation, the slavery they seek to impose on us.

Whether, or not, the handcuffs are lined with velvet.