Excuse me but this country was founded BY doers ... smart, courageous doers and not whiners.
Aside from the fact that those who opposed their little uprising often enough denounced them
as whiners, those who founded this country were also
thinkers.
You could say the Original Dads weren't as smart as some of the people crawling around today's assorted Internet forums---they had to think before they acted, spoke or wrote. (Or does anyone think the War of Independence was just a spur-of-the-moment temper tantrum?)
I recommend very heartily this two-volume set (the total actual texts occupy 1,378 pages):
I realise that thinking is considered politically incorrect in today's political world where the schoolyard brawl (if not the back-alley mugging) has replaced deliberation and debate left and right alike; and, that the major party candidates for the presidency today think (as have too many of their predecessors) that the Constitution is some leaky old wooden boat moored at or just outside Boston Harbour.
But I remind myself (as I did in 2016, when the major party choice was between an arsonist with a blow torch and an arsonist who liked to play with matches) of the wisdom of Peter Viereck:
Any attempt to scrape the barnacles off an excellent if aging ship is never considered to be an attack on the ship itself. Except by the barnacles.I still believe in freedom, what's left of it.
I still believe in individual rights and responsibilities. (And in that order.)
I still believe in a properly-construed
government, whose sole legitimate business---other than protecting us from and defending us against enemies actual and provably iminent from abroad and predators (
real predators, not mere vice-mongers or sociopolitical opponents) at home---is to
stay the hell out of your business, my business, everyone's business, until or unless one would obstruct or abrogate another's equivalent rights.
I still disbelieve in the improperly-consecrated
State that pokes its nose into any and just about every nook, cranny, and crevice of everyone's business, whether or not it is either competent or constitutionally sanctioned to do so.
And, aside from what Gene Healy has called "the cult of the presidency" (it didn't begin with the incumbent, and the evidence as it is suggests it won't end with him, either) continuing to flourish, it should cause profound indigestion that what Sen. Sam Ervin once feared (
As long as I have a mind to think, a tongue to speak, and a heart to love my country, I shall deny that the Constitution confers any autocratic power on the President, or authorizes him to convert George Washington's America into Gaius Caesar's Rome) threatens to come to pass, and that today's political (lack of) class seems to think in all seriousness that the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were just fake news.