An Awful Ordeal

We must realize that today’s Establishment is the new George III.  Whether it will continue to adhere to his tactics, we do not know.  If it does, the redress, honored in tradition, is also revolution.
Poets and authors have told us that our society has been surfeited with goods, that our people are mostly well-fed, that marketing and advertising devices have put into our hands all manner and form of gadgets to meet any whim, but that we are unhappy and not free.
The young generation sees this more clearly than their parents do.  The youngsters who rise up in protest have not formulated a program for action.  Few want to destroy the system.  The aim of most of them is to regain the freedom of choice that their ancestors lost, to be free, to be masters of their destiny.
We know by now that technology can be toxic as well as tonic.  We know by now that if we make technology the predestined force in our lives, man will walk to the measure of its demands.  We know how leveling that influence can be, how easy it is to computerize man and make him a servile thing in a vast industrial complex.
This means we must subject the machine – technology – to control and cease despoiling the earth and filling people with goodies merely to make money.  The search of the youth today is for ways and means to make the machine – and the vast bureaucracy of the corporation state and of the government that runs that machine – the servant of man.
That is the revolution that is coming.
That revolution – now that the people hold the residual powers of government – need not be a repetition of 1776.  It could be a revolution in the nature of an explosive political regeneration.  It depends on how wise the Establishment is.  If, with its stockpile of arms, it resolves to suppress the dissenters, America will face, I fear, an awful ordeal.
—    Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas
From his book:   “Points of Rebellion“
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On This Day In:
2021	The Same Goes For Countries And Elected Leaders
	Just Beginning…
2020	Your True Standard
	But When The Smoke Had Cleared Away…
2019	Ooh, Shiny
	Day 4: Surprised
2018	We Are Approaching Default
	Running On History
	Day 37: Blended Not Juiced
2017	Today Is Not Lost
	Day 8
2016	Paying Attention
2015	An Awful Ordeal
2014	What Are You Doing?
2013	Lives > 1
2012	Strange To All The World
2011	Unnecessary Stagefright

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