{"id":1426,"date":"2010-11-22T11:03:32","date_gmt":"2010-11-22T17:03:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/coloradoconfluence.com\/?p=1426"},"modified":"2010-11-28T13:55:39","modified_gmt":"2010-11-28T19:55:39","slug":"its-a-wonderful-life-u-s-government-edition-part-i","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/coloradoconfluence.com\/?p=1426","title":{"rendered":"“It’s a wonderful life,” U.S. political edition, Part I"},"content":{"rendered":"

(See \u201cIt\u2019s a Wonderful Life,\u201d American Political Edition (Parts I-V)<\/a>\u00a0for all five parts combined and revised)<\/p>\n

(Opening scene: Angels, represented by twinkling stars,\u00a0are talking about a troubled soul on Earth. They review this soul’s life, and the circumstances that led to its present difficulties….)<\/p>\n

It was conceived\u00a0with great hopes in a simpler time,\u00a0by a variety of generous parents, and a few original sins. England (via the British Empire), in which modern democracy developed; The Enlightenment,\u00a0characterized by\u00a0a fluorescence of rationalistic philosophy; a wide-open new land, with an easily displaced indigenous population; abundant imported and bred slave labor. It\u00a0developed a grandiose vision for itself, one comprised of the somewhat incompatible “manifest destiny” and protection of liberty, and a faith in its own exceptionalism.<\/p>\n

But, as often happens, life presented unforeseen challenges which diverted this soul, the\u00a0sovereign American People,\u00a0from its youthful dreams. It gradually was forced to confront its original sins, brutally divided by one of them. Innovations complicated the\u00a0landscape in which its dreams had been formed.\u00a0It had to cope with a\u00a0world\u00a0comprised of other people with interests of their own,\u00a0people less convinced of\u00a0the\u00a0benevolence of this popular sovereignty than that populace itself was.<\/p>\n

But despite this diversion from its original dreams, it was the same soul, peforming many good deeds, born of pragmatism rather than idealism,\u00a0that were not part of the original plan. It grew to address a changing world, doing what needed to be done to increase the welfare of those who depended on it. It intervened in the home of its parents when brutality racked\u00a0the latter’s\u00a0fields and towns, and then watched those parents, unencumbered by youthful dreams,\u00a0combine the best fruits of their child’s aspirations with the reduced purism that comes from maturity.<\/p>\n

But something in the people clung to the purity of youthful dreams, sulking with resistance\u00a0to adulthood’s demands,\u00a0an error that\u00a0sometimes characterizes youth. Just at the point when\u00a0both the people and their government were on the verge of following the mature wisdom of moderation and adaptation, the dreamer within, childish and narcissistic rather than noble and generous, rebelled, and rent this soul in an internal conflict over whether mature moderation would prevail, or childish purism.<\/p>\n

The childish purism rebelled in a moment of crisis, and a large faction of the people said, “Government is not the solution, it’s the problem! The world would be better off without this government we’ve allowed to grow and grow, displacing the purity we had believed in and tried to implement in our youth!\u00a0We would be better off if we had not allowed\u00a0the lessons of life\u00a0to\u00a0adapt those youthful dreams to the\u00a0demands of\u00a0reality!”<\/p>\n

And so this soul’s guardian angel decided to show it what the world would have been like without that modern government it now wished dead….<\/p>\n

(Continued in \u201cWonderful Life,\u201d Part II<\/a>)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(See \u201cIt\u2019s a Wonderful Life,\u201d American Political Edition (Parts I-V)\u00a0for all five parts combined and revised) (Opening scene: Angels, represented by twinkling stars,\u00a0are talking about a troubled soul on Earth. They review this soul’s life, and the circumstances that led to its present difficulties….) It was conceived\u00a0with great hopes in a simpler time,\u00a0by a variety […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[39,4],"tags":[91,996,990,993,989,995,988,991,606,994,992],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/coloradoconfluence.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1426"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/coloradoconfluence.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/coloradoconfluence.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coloradoconfluence.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coloradoconfluence.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1426"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/coloradoconfluence.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1426\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1523,"href":"https:\/\/coloradoconfluence.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1426\/revisions\/1523"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/coloradoconfluence.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1426"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coloradoconfluence.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1426"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coloradoconfluence.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1426"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}