Re: RE XP or 2000

["Robert Holmgren" holmgren@xxxxxxxx]

** Reply to message from Caballero  on Tue, 2 Dec
2003 23:22:53 -0700 (MST)

>> On Sat, 29 Nov 2003, Robert Holmgren wrote:

>> subscribe to Ben Franklin's view: "They that can give up essential liberty
to
>> obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
>> (Historical Review of Pennsylvania, 1759)

> Robert, thank you for this wonderful Franklin quotation. It stayed with
> me this week. --Carlo Caballero

It reminds me of another trenchant comment, by Thomas Jefferson, reacting to
people who announced in self-defense that they were "just doing their job".
Jefferson called it "the last excuse of little people who are ashamed of
themselves." In Jefferson's time, most people were self-employed and had a
profound pride that nobody told them what to do. Today 99% are employees, so
it sounds like a much tougher judgment -- a sweeping criticism, even, of all
who accept jobs that require them to subordinate their own beliefs to the
boss's. Yet, I think, Jefferson's observation remains almost always true, and
exceedingly uncomfortable. Very few people give any consideration to the
essential (and scary) nature of freedom as it relates to them, personally.
Whatever happened to high school Civics classes?

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Robert Holmgren
holmgren@xxxxxxxx
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