Column about Sanker
was ‘beautiful’ article
Thanks to Laurie Marshall and her Personal Space column on Saturday, Sept. 24. What a beautiful article about Dan Sanker and the memories he has of his young boys. I love his reply about “changing or improving the space.” “No way to make it better … I’ll always have the memories.”
What a beautiful thought in this world of always wanting to have something bigger or better. Beautiful article, Ms Marshall, I think you had some great material to work with so, it had to be a joy for you to put it together.
DOUG WARRINGS
Eureka Springs
‘Combustible’ Constitution
in danger of being lit again
The nature of American government was best stated by Abraham Lincoln in his address on Nov. 19, 1863, at Soldiers’ National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Penn. Lasting but two minutes, the address captured perfectly the essence of that government fashioned by the greatest minds in the former 13 colonies “four score and seven years” previously on Sept. 17, 1787. That government, as perfectly summarized by Lincoln, was one cobbled together to assure that “government of the people, by the people, for the people,” — i.e., a representative democracy — “should not perish from the earth.”
A great battle had been fought at that place in a war that was testing the very survival, and premise, of that government which, as Lincoln said, was dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Lincoln clearly knew all government is necessarily a very fragile construct — existing only by either (1) imposition of force, or threat thereof, to assure the sufferance of the governed, or (2) as in the case of the government fashioned by those great minds gathered in Philadelphia to fashion the Constitution of the United States, the voluntary joining of man to devise a voluntary manner of governing themselves.
The unstated corollary of the second form of government is that, unlike the first, it is not founded upon threat of canon, bombs, shot and shell or the loosing of same; it is but written on a scrap of paper and exists only so long as “the people” choose that it exist.
Lincoln’s Address was given near the end of the first great challenge to the proposition that all men are created equal that commenced on April 12, 1861, with the attack of Confederate troops led by Brig. Gen. Beauregard upon Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, S.C. That challenge to the continuance of representative democracy did not formally end until the surrender of Confederate forces under Gen. Robert E. Lee was accepted by Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant in the home of Wilmer McLean in Appomattox Court House, Va., on April 9, 1865.
That fragile, and combustible, “piece of paper” had been set afire but not been consumed. And the question now before the “the people” is whether that “paper” will again be lit by the fire, anger, bluster and patent self-interest of a truly gifted incendiary and demagogue named Donald Trump and his many dedicated followers intent upon the overthrow of what they describe as “government as usual.” That is, a government that still stands, however tremulously it may sometimes appear, for the proposition that the rights of all men are created equal and the rights of every person, of whatever race, religion or financial status shall to that end be protected.
It should be remembered by all that it is a very short step from an ill-informed populist uprising fomented by a demagogue to a dictatorship, a monarchy, or other type of tyranny. And that the necessary end of that process is anarchy.
DON SWITZER
Rogers