Open Letter/Essay: Turning Era for History

 

Open Letter/Essay: Turning Era for History

--Short version

By Tim Krenz

April 10, 2024

Copyright © 2024 The CEPIA CLUB LLC

History holds numerous turning points. For people living in times of great changes, a perceptive few saw these changes approaching. When the hour struck, on the other hand, the majority of the people only then realized the chimes had rung. How the turning points changed everything in the contemporary circumstances left few unaffected. Change came. Most individuals and all institutions changed with them, as matters of necessity. The ones who resisted change fell behind or perished. In some cases, the changes came for the betterment of the people affected, or in certain instances, for those who survived. When better things resulted, people and their trusted, capable leaders had clear vision, high competence, sound confidence, and the hard-earned recognition to do the right things for the right reasons.

The United States of America, like the entire world, most likely now approaches one of those decisive turning points. The moment, rich with peril and possibly opportunity, presents people and leaders on every side with choices. How these individuals respond to the times and the courses of action they choose to follow will determine the collective fates of all.

The same turning points have happened in America in the 248 years since Independence. Some more sad, some more useless, some mixed and unfortunate. Yet the turning points happened, and some brought the United States to the brink of dissolution. Some brought carnage. Of these changes, the many failed to act, while the one individual or a small group consolidated their acts in ways detrimental to the majority and their liberty.

For bad examples:

Years following the war of the Revolution, Alexander Hamilton used the Constitution to implement his system of debt legitimacy and credit to anchor the new Federal system as the primary authority in the new world. All things financial and all the legalities of the world, including American foreign war and domestic coercion to enforce them, stem from Hamilton's vision.

Andrew Jackson, as general and President, created a system of politics (and the Democratic Party) that played on the emotions of spoils and popularity, and promoted the system of conquest, and settlement across the continent. Even Thomas Jefferson probably never dreamed such nightmares.

In the Antebellum America, a combination of homesteading, railroads, industrialization, immigration, land ownership and urbanization, and the ancient scourge of human chattel slavery gave rise to causes of secession, centralization, and the Republican Party. The Civil War decided who would control this whole system. Even though the war settled the question of slavery, the war ultimately decided on how the spoils would get divided, thus building on and consolidating Jackson’s democracy system.

In 1932, the global great depression and mass poverty, the Bonus Army and President Hoover’s and General MacArthur’s reaction to that, populism and Huey Long, and socialism, etc.--all had brought the United States to another turning point. Then came the New Deal and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s campaign for President. His election that year might have stopped a revolt form below and an impending catastrophe. It did provoke a plan by many on Wall Street to conduct a coup, through agency of BRIG GEN. Smedly Butler, USMC, who betrayed their secret cabal. Like others at turning points, FDR changed the nature of politics in America with his alignment of voters. He promised them the New Deal to feed and employ them. :In turn it took people away from a heritage of cultural localism and away from the extended family as a social mainstay. FDR’s promise brought the country closer, in turn, to more centralization and government as paternal caretaker of the needs of its citizens. Appealing to the poor, the illiterate, the minorities, all who suffered significantly from the depression, and taking the votes of many of the educated class and the unionized labor, FDR promised that the spoils would now no longer go to the victor. Now they went from the private sector to the government, through the intermediaries, and back to those who gave it originally. In this great realignment of big government for big power and big profit, this system has essentially endured until now, regardless of party.

All of these turning points in the history of the United States have happened in the history of the world as well. These events usually begin with some revolutionary or new things or an invention or even a better, simpler idea. Where did these events go wrong for the freedom of the many? The results trended towards more injustice for mostly everyone, regardless of differences, due to a lack of sound mass leadership that promoted and protected the common interest of a liberty for all.

The world has debt, as it always has, because it measures wealth in gold and not in the golden rule. It has wars and threats of wars, because leaders prey over and manipulate the fear and greed of humans. While it always has since invention, the threat of nuclear weapons and omnicide (or the death of everything) hangs a shroud around the future. The end could come from a miscalculation of interests or sheer stupidity or from an absolute evil. The world has poor, starvation, and illiteracy. Worse, it has the angst and fear of uncertainty. The death trap the world faces, however, may exist in the philosophical, the inability of current ideas and imagination to agree to disagree, and still live in non-violent and non-coercive peace. All signs point to a fight, between those who would enslave through authority and violence and opposed by those who want the world to work in freedom and amity.

How can this get resolved? How does the tension of anxiety in people translate into another form, like a vigilantly permanent peace?

First, the best hope for peace and tranquility anywhere comes in the conviction that united peoples, united movements, and united states can achieve great things, and the right things. The common goal will always remain a country of liberty for all, safe within itself, and truly free in this world.

Second, everyone and especially every voter must understand these opportunities to change everything only come rarely. United, everyone must seize this moment. The country, the world, have no other choice. Taking action, in positive ways, saves the future by freeing things in the present. The risk of failure to make better choices now, of ignoring the dangers or missing the historic significance of this next turning point, may become fatal, in all ways.

History has examples of catastrophe coming from points like these, but those disastrous circumstances concluded by centralized authority and power profits getting stronger. They did so only because the majority of people failed to unite and act when they should have.

On the contrary, when people united behind a creed, a philosophy, or a faith in somethings, great transformations happened—take the Buddha, Jesus, and Gandhi, for example. Even if individuals initially started a turning point, they did not transform it alone, nor did their idea, their belief or their hopes end with them.

For this era and our next great opportunity to change things, liberty and freedom—for everyone and everywhere—hold the great power the country needs. Libertarianism, as a philosophy contains within itself the belief that truly free people best represent the future for peace. And a growing faith among those who act in Liberty’s name possesses for the world the last true hope for it.

Join together. Make history happen, the true way at last.