What would the Framers {of the U.S. Constitution } be most struck by in America today? I mean after they had recovered from the shock of seeing clean, strong white teeth instead of decayed yellow stumps in the mouths of their descendants; after they had assimilated the fact of the astounding number of Americans who were neither crippled, disease-wasted, nor packmarked from smallpox; and of course, after they had taken rapt eyes off the high-speed vehicles on the streets? After these astonishments, what reactions might there be to the political and cultural scene?

Three aspects of the present age in America would surely draw their immediate, concerned, and perhaps incredulous attention.

First, the prominence of war in American life since 1914, amounting to a virtual Seventy Five Year War; and with this the staggering size of the American military establishment since World War II. The framers had relied on two broad oceans for the license to draft the most nonmilitary constitution imaginable.

Second, the Leviathan-like presence of the national government in the affairs of states, towns, and cities, and in the lives, cradle to grave, of individuals. The Framers had worked most diligently to prevcent any future hypertrophy of the federal government. They had particularly disliked the sprawling bureaucracies of Europe of their day.

Third, the number of Americans who seem only loosely attached to groups and values such as kinship, community, and property, and whose lives are so plainly governed by the cash nexus.

The Present Age:
Progress and Anarchy in Modern America
Robert A. Nisbet
1988 Are 'Jehovah's Witnesses' a Cult?

from pastor russell blogspot

---

One thing is clear at this late point in the age that began for America in 1914 with the Great War: The popular, the folk optimism, what an admiring, affectionate Lord Bryce called the Fatalism of the Multitude in America is fast waning. Americans are much less likely than they were a century ago to believe there is a special Providence that looks our for America and guides her purity of conscience to ever greater heights. And they are immensely less likely than were their Puritan forebears three hundred and fifty years ago to see America as the 'city set on a hill,' with the world's eyes upon it.

The Guns of August (1914) Cornel West writes: With the advent of the guns of August in 1914, sounding the opening shots of World War I, race and empire were the perimeters of American democracy -- hardly seen by most white Americans yet harshly lived by most peoples of color. The war not only shattered European myths of progress and illusions of security, but also disclosed the brutal realities and bestial desires of imperial Europe. As major European empires collapsed -- such as the Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, and Czarist Russian empires -- seismic shifts took place across the globe. [p54, Democracy Matters]

The Great War "to end all war" After WW I and the demise of the Osman Empire the European powers France and United Kingdom redesigned the "Middle East" disregarding ethic-religious, historic and cultural factors. On the drawing-board they created new states like Jordan, Iraq and Syria with new artificial boundaries. They "forgot" to create one state: Kurdistan - as the homeland for then about 30-40 million Kurds. This new design triggered multifaceted tensions and conflicts between and within the states in the Middle East until today. Most of the current conflicts in North Africa and the Gulf region have their origin in the aftermath of WW I.

August 22, 2007

Charles Taze Russell
With his beautiful Quaker beard
(he was not a Quaker)

See
We Can Solve It
Renewable Energy Database
Solar ~ sustainable future
New Thinking About Cults

Tact is the intelligence of the heart.

quoted in Answers in the Heart: Daily Meditations for
Men And Women Recovering From Sex Addiction
(Hazelden Meditation Series) 1989.

Hinge Point of History

"In 1914 the world lost a coherence which it has not managed to capture since. . . . This has been a time of extraordinary disorder and violence, both across national frontiers and within them." [The Economist]

The events in Sarajevo in 1914 snowballed beyond all expectations of any of the actors in an unfolding drama of international upheaval that, before it was over, would topple four world-historical empires of the previous age -- (1) the Ottoman Empire of the Turks, (2) the Hohenzollern Empire of Germany, (3) the Habsburg, Austro-Hungarian Empire, and, even before the others, (4) the Czarist Empire of Romanov Russia, which had endured since 1613.

"It is indeed the year 1914 rather than that of Hiroshima which marks the turning point of our time, for by now we can see that ... it was the first world war that ushered in the era of confused transition in the midst of which we are floundering." [René Albrecht-Carrié]

"Looking back from the vantage point of the present we see clearly that the outbreak of World War I ushered in a twentieth-century 'Time of Troubles' -- in the expressive term of the british historian Arnold Toynbee -- from which our civilization has by no means emerged." [Edmund Taylor, The Fall of Dynasties.]

The British historian H.R. Trevor-Roper writes: "The first (World) War . . . closed a long era of general peace and began a new age of violence in which the second (World) War is simply an episode. Since 1914 the world has a new character: a character of international anarchy." [1964]

West Germany's Konrad Adenauer, pointed out in 1964 that since 1914 security and quiet have disappeared from men's lives. A year later, America's former president Dwight D. Eisenhower said much the same regarding the global geopolitical condition: "A deterioration has been going on since the First World War." [see Berdj Kenadjian. Economics of the New Age]

Scientist Nassim Nicholas Taleb refers to the events of 1914 as a Black Swan, utterly unpredictable and improbable, carrying extreme impact, yet something mankind has tried to explain after the fact as if it had been explainable and predictable all along.

Out of the Great War that 1914 produced, ultimately T.E.Lawrence, aka Lawrence of Arabia, joined forces with Arab leaders Sherif Hussein, Prince Feisal and others to defy the powerful Ottomon empire, and finally bring it to its knees. With the Balfour Declaration, a new day for the holy land was inaugurated. Ploughing Sand: The British replaced the Turks in the lands promised to Abraham. The world would never be the same.

see Ploughing Sand: British Rule in Palestine 1917-48 by Naomi Shepherd

Robert Shepherd adds: I find some uncanny oddities in a discussion of Jewish tradition (or superstition). So many of the calamities in their five thousand year old national experience have occurred on Tish b'Av, the ninth of Av. Not just 1914, when Russian armies mobilized (Tish b'Av, in our year of 1914), but others also, including the destruction of both the first Temple of Solomon and the second Temple (Zerubbabel, with major additions by Herod) as well.

The year 1914 (our calendar) beginning with the mobilization of the Czar's armies on Tish b'Av, would lead in very few years to the end of Eastern European Jewry.

Skirts that are too short can
distract from your words

President Eisenhower said Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

Martin Luther King, Jr. said I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality. I refuse to accept the cynical notion that nation after nation must spiral down a militaristic stairway into the hell of mutually assured annihilation. I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant. (Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech) See Lift Every Voice and Sing