Photo by Alexander Gardner; photo illustration by Scott Suchy, Charleston City Paper.
By Ashley Herndon
OCEANSIDE, Calif. | What a wonderful world. What a wonderful force…but wrongful motivation destroys.
Herndon
The primary motivations in settling North America were religious freedom, commercial opportunity, political freedom, and individual property rights for individual persons or a group, such as in Maryland, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina. Even consider Georgia and Oglethorpe’s idea for what today we would call a Fresh Start. We are still quarreling over two of those issues; those issues are:
- the love of mankind or
- domination.
Historians advise us that one of the most powerful motivations was to escape domination, either one person, one family, a community, or former prisoners, from a tribal style of rule. Makes sense to me. But we have some real fanatics today who are motivated to turn government over to radicals who wish to dominate and reduce our freedoms…especially education and voting.
My grandfather, “Mr. Archie,” once advised me about behavior: “Ashley, ignorance is a wonderful thing. It can be overcome by education, but stupidity is a real personal problem.” He continued, in his soft bass voice, “I hope you don’t develop a personal problem.” I believe to this day, his motivation was to educate and elucidate, not denigrate, or dominate.
Some of our original colonies became rambunctious and many were motivated not to pay their fair share or did not care for the King’s administrative personnel (who were questionable at best). James and his brother, King Charles II, both ‘party guys’ found it hard to rule others since they could not take care of business in their own castles.
King Charlie (he of massive hairdo) created the Dominion of “New” England. He certainly blew that round. What with proprietors elsewhere, and mixed languages and cultural heritages and different economies, failure was its only outcome trying to rule from afar.
Kings Charles and James did not understand how to lead a cobbler, a smithy, a preacher, a farmer, a carpenter, a fisherman, et al, while you are gallivanting and appointing incompetents! We learned how that worked between 2017 and 2021. Let us continue as the United States of America, not under the “Dominion of Mar-a-Lago” or similar ‘my way or the highway’ rule.
Our National motivation is to sustain our democracy, not a fanatic-driven authoritarian-oligarchic dictatorship. “Dominion” means to dictate. “United” means together.
Senator Charles Sumner said about one of our presidents: “Lincoln was mistaken that ‘the world will little note, nor long remember what we say here.’ Instead: he remarked, “The world noted at once what he said, and will never cease to remember it. The battle itself was less important than the speech.” The same goes for those willing to place their lives in peril today defending our Constitutional Republic from would be tyrants.
Compare part of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and the January 6 assault on democracy. The Address states what our current CEO reminds us of: “… our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. We cannot allow a new group of Radicals to dominate and plunge us into a new and bitter false Reconstruction.”
The Gettysburg Address continued warning the country and expressing how the War brought us into a new era, (reconstruction), explaining away the ignorance and greed of the rebel leaders. Lincoln elucidated as did Granddaddy, “Stupidity is a personal problem” and “Ignorance can be overcome with education.”
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