If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be. | |
― Thomas Jefferson | |
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On This Day In: | |
2022 | What Really Matters |
Lots Of Fog | |
2021 | Families |
Every Now And Then (Total Eclipse Of The Heart) | |
2020 | A Message To Optional Trump Supporters (Basically Everyone) |
2019 | Bigger Jaws |
On The Other | |
2018 | Hoping For A Blue Wave In November |
2017 | Garden Dreaming |
2016 | Well, Maybe Not “No” Talent |
2015 | An Appetite For Life |
A Trip To The Library | |
Great Expectations | |
2014 | Pass The Soul |
2013 | Zapping Music And Art |
2012 | Not Quite Fantastic |
That Kid Is Back | |
2011 | Wolves At The Door |
2010 | I’m Feeling Patriotic… (Well, more than usual, anyway.) |
Beating the Heat… | |
Great Expectations
July 19, 2015 by kmabarrett
A difficult thing, reconciling the beautiful, noble rhetoric and virtue of the Founding Fathers and the fact that many of them owned slaves.
Hi,
Thanks for the visit and the comment!
You are quite correct that looking back we see an inherent contradiction (hypocrisy). But, then you have to consider they believed political freedom to be quite different from personal freedom. Related, but not the same thing at all.
Within their paradigm, education leads to personal freedom because you can make educated decisions as an electorate. Without a general high level of education, the vox populi is swayed or lost completely. Again, remember not all “freemen” could vote. In most of the colonies (and later the States), voting was restricted to free white males of property. These were the people Jefferson was concerned about educating – not your common riff-raff (those who might be free but without property), let alone slaves.
The interesting thing is that his quote has just as applicable a message to us even though our world (ability to vote) is very different from his day. Maybe, more so…
Kevin
Interesting, K. But they were smart enough to recognize the import of their words on a larger scale and for those who prepared their meals.
While I am confident you are correct, I also believe we read aphorisms and apply them to our life and times and then reverse engineer those applications into the speakers life and times regardless of whether the application is necessarily correct. That is, we “want” to believe the speaker felt as we feel now.
Thanks again for the comment! 🙂
Ha ha ha.