The Ball is Rolling

I've been getting tons of random "friend" requests lately from people I don't know. In fact, I think many of the requests aren't even real. According the Facebook I have 750 "friends". Some of them aren't friends or even acquaintances but just people that I know who they are. Every once in a while I notice someone is my FB friend and I can't recall how I know (or knew) them, so I remove them.

I have another category of FB friends called "unfollowed". Wonderful people that I don't necessarily want to unfriend but who are like a broken record posting the same political crap over, and over. It's interesting to me how FB brings out the best and the worst in people sometimes.

Lately I've noticed people saying some really nasty political stuff. And pointing the finger at anyone that could possibly have a differing opinion. Then the very next day say they could never support someone like The Donald because he's too harsh.

Tuesday Arizona held it's primary. Nearly 40% of the AZ democrats voted for Bernie Sanders.

As I said earlier, I have 750 Facebook friends. The majority are cyclists. I'd estimate that the vast majority of cyclists are left leaning. So that means that 300 +/- of you either voted for Bernie, or would have.

Some of us are very quiet about our politics. But it's easy to figure out just by noticing when comments move us to click the "like" button. Once in a while I'm shocked to learn how a particular person feels about a topic, but most of the time I have a good idea of a persons world view.

Below is an article that I first read a decade ago, which recently re-surfaced on FB. Personally, I think we are in the "From apathy to dependence" stage. The ball is already rolling. If The Donald is in the Whitehouse, the ball will keep rolling, maybe at a slower pace. If The Bern gets in, the ball will be pushed over the edge of the cliff. Either way I think it's what we "the people" collectively want.

In 1887 Alexander Tyler, a Scottish history professor at the University of Edinburgh , had this to say about the fall of the Athenian Republic some 2,000 years ...prior: "A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse over loose fiscal policy, (which is) always followed by a dictatorship."

"The average age of the world's greatest civilizations from the beginning of history, has been about 200 years. During those 200 years, these nations always progressed through the following sequence:

From bondage to spiritual faith;
From spiritual faith to great courage;
From courage to liberty;
From liberty to abundance;
From abundance to complacency;
From complacency to apathy;
From apathy to dependence;
From dependence back into bondage."

By the way, The United States of America is NOT a democracy. We're a Republic. Our founding fathers noted a BIG difference in the two forms of government. In a democracy, majority rules. In a republic, citizens have God given rights which can't be taken away.

Rights can't be taken away, but they most-definitely can be given away. Unfortunately, in the "liberty to abundance" era, we have voted for people who voted to make certain amendments to our Constitution which have very effectively done exactly that.

The Donald and The Bern are the least of our problems. If Alexander Tyler isn't smoking his socks, then we have the undeniable history of civilization to contend with.