Originally published April 21 2013
Opinion: The U.S. Founding Fathers might (surprise!) still actually be proud of parts of America today
by Michael A. Bedar, MA
(NaturalNews) It is said frequently today, "Our founding fathers would roll over in their graves to see what is happening in America today." This may, indeed, be correct. The framers of our revolutionary country went to battle with the pen and the musket to live in liberty and justice.
Amidst all the ways America is likely falling short of, or being held back from, the founders' vision, are there any encouraging indications? Does anything exist in America that resembles the founders' hopes? Here are five pursuits and movements in America today that can re-strengthen the sense of connection to the founders and, just maybe, let the founding fathers find pride in today's country:
The resurgence of conscious, compassionate, and autonomous eating
While there are people all across this nation who are drowning in illness and debt from a sickened populace, there is nonetheless a Jefferson-esque revival movement for the freedom to eat real, healthy, nutritious, natural food. Thomas Jefferson said, "If the people let government decide what foods they eat and what medicines they take, their bodies will soon be in as sorry a state as are the souls of those who live under tyranny."
Further, the same Thomas Jefferson, who said, "I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny," also said, "Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages."
So it emerges that conscious, compassionate eaters, who stand up for their right to eat naturally, and break out of the prison of what advertisements, schools, and extensions of corrupt government agencies are offering as "food," might in fact make the author of the Declaration of Independence, and the founder who urged James Madison to write the Bill of Rights, suspend his state of shock at what this nation has become for just a moment of a smile.
The rediscovery of hemp
Industries, activists, and the citizenry are realizing that the hemp plant fiber should be grown and used in America as food, fabric, fuel, rope, paper, and more, as it was during the founders' time. The State of Kentucky recently passed a legalization of the hemp industry with 90% of the legislative vote.
Use of hemp had strong support from the founding fathers like George Washington, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson. Washington planted, grew, and marketed many acres of hemp. The framers wrote drafts of the US Constitution on hemp paper.
Today, organic hemp imported from nearby countries is growing fast in popularity as a food and clothing fabric in the U.S.A., while political movements to allow its domestic growth and other amazing uses are beginning to be heard in both states and the federal government.
Agrarian living with austere respect and gratitude for seeds
Benjamin Franklin, the philosopher, scientist, and statesman of the American Revolution said:
"Finally, there seem to be but three ways for a nation to acquire wealth. The first is by war as the Romans did in plundering their conquered neighbors. This is robbery. The second by commerce which is generally cheating. The third by agriculture the only honest way; wherein man receives a real increase of the seed thrown into the ground, in a kind of continual miracle wrought by the hand of God in his favor, as a reward for his innocent life, and virtuous industry."
You would have to stretch Franklin's position to even begin to see him possibly condoning giant agribusiness ventures of the biotech industry, because such ventures assume the right to insert the products of commerce, fabricated in highly expensive laboratories, into the ground, therefore turning agriculture from a continual (unbroken) miracle wrought by the hand of God into an activity inherently full of man-made cheating.
And when Thomas Jefferson discusses agriculture as the wisest contribution "to good morals and happiness," he probably didn't include the suicides of farmers whom GMO seeds have ruined in the category of good morals and happiness.
The organic, GMO-free, topsoil-regenerating movement, from the slopes of permaculture to the legislatures, to reduce the power and influence of GMOs over agriculture, would turn up the corners of America's founders' lips.
Freedom of speech
Free minds in America today are contributing an increasing portion of the intellectual capabilities necessary to keep the republic in shape, while fewer relevant ideas come from minds who are primarily concerned with maintaining large government bureaus or corporations. The founders foresaw the utmost importance of preventing the impingement of freedom of speech.
The First Amendment in the Bill of Rights represents this recognition of the importance of free minds and freedom of speech. Today, a vast, growing community of Americans are actively utilizing and defending their freedom of speech and spreading new cycles of ideas through 21st century means: Information-entrepreneurship, controversial literature and journalism, new political movements, and through the internet, alternative media, citizen documentarians, and more. Those self-publishing, blogging, YouTubing, and filmmaking today with coverage of real, sometimes buried stories and fresh ideas, are more on the pulse of true human yearnings today than big institutions can be. And they are greatly appreciated friends of the Constitution's framers.
Spiritual inquiry
The desire to know the mystery of the universe intimately, and to sense one's special place and role in the unfolding, living cosmos, appears to be more intensely expressed in America today than ever before. Perhaps nowhere else, ever, has all the spiritual traditions and psychological studies been available to immerse oneself in.
The patriot who encouraged the American Revolution, Thomas Paine, said:
"When the divine gift of reason begins to expand itself in the mind and calls man to reflection, he then reads and contemplates God and His works. The creation is the Bible of the true believer in God. Everything in this vast volume inspires him with sublime ideas of the Creator...What can be a greater miracle than the creation itself, and his own existence?...Reason and our belief become happily united. The wonderful structure of the universe, and everything we behold in the system of the creation, prove to us, far better than books can do, the existence of a God, and at the same time proclaim His attributes....It is by the exercise of our reason that we are enabled to contemplate God in His works, and imitate Him in His ways. When we see His care and goodness extended over all His creatures, it teaches us our duty toward each other, while it calls forth our gratitude to Him. It is by forgetting God in His works, and running after the books of pretended revelation, that man has wandered from the straight path of duty and happiness, and become by turns the victim of doubt and the dupe of delusion."
Contemporary spiritual aspirants who, with awe, see the beauty in it all, and from this direct experience seek to treat all beings with goodness, are linked in a spiritual connection to America's founders.
George Washington said, "The ways of Providence being inscrutable, and the justice of it not to be scanned by the shallow eye of humanity, nor to be counteracted by the utmost efforts of human power or wisdom, resignation, and as far as the strength of our reason and religion can carry us, a cheerful acquiescence to the Divine Will, is what we are to aim."
Washington stated at his farewell address, "Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports."
A curious, open attitude to quiet, divine teachings within creation, and a desire for deep insight and awareness that matches the depth of our challenges, is welling up in America. George Washington, Thomas Paine, and other founders who realized how precious our souls and our freedom are, would be glad about that.
Alternatives that address today's challenges can be empowered by seeing where America stands vis-a-viz the founders
The founders lived for a better civilization, in the face of tyranny, injustice, instability, war, uncertainty, and more. To rise to the occasion, they did not stop at what had existed up to that time. They stood on the shoulders of those who had influenced them to come up with their own expressions of improving the world. America faces pressures today that may be analogous to those of the founders', but the challenges are coming to us in different forms.
Since problems must be discerned before they can be solved, the founders started by writing the list of grievances in the Declaration of Independence. Discerning the problems truthfully is additionally difficult in today's maze of spin, spam, and information saturation. A clear-sighted, modern-day declaration of revolting grievances might be necessary to unleash the new wave of consciousness and natural way-of-life revolution. NaturalNews seems to be knocking on the door of such a list.
At the very least, we can get more connected to the spirit of freedom and justice within us, and in the relationship between us and America's founding history, by noticing movements alive today - such as organic GMO-free food, hemp products, involvement in farms, freedom of speech, and an opened, curious spirituality - that would give the founding fathers a taste, for a moment, of peace in an afterlife that is surely tumultuous if they are watching us.
Sources for this article include:
1. Thomas Jefferson, The Jeffersonian Cyclopedia, p. 386, by Thomas Jefferson, Edited by John P. Foley, Funk & Wagnalls Company, New York and London, 1900
2. Benjamin Franklin, Positions to be Examined, April 4, 1769.
3. George Washington, letter to Colonel Bassett, Apr. 25, 1773
4. Thomas Paine, Of The Religion Of Deism Compared With The Christian Religion
About the author:
Michael Bedar MA, BS, is a researcher, writer, and holistic wellness counselor. He is the associate producer with a founding role in the documentary, "Simply Raw: Reversing Diabetes in 30 Days" and is the writer-director of "EcoParque." He now distributes approximately 50 film, ebook, and audio titles through YoelMedia.com. He manages a holistic health practice, facilitates local and online natural wellness and spiritual growth programs, and juices regularly. He helps people live in healthy homes, support their natural fertility, encourage their optimal nutrition, and come into their full presence. He is the Co-Director of Tree of Life - Bay Area, and he has an MA in Live-Food and Spiritual Nutrition from the Cousens School of Holistic Wellness. Bedar's BS from UCSD is an interdisciplinary concentration of Environmental Chemistry, Law and Society, and Design Anthropology.
Michael Bedar MA, BS, is a researcher, writer, and holistic wellness counselor. He is the associate producer with a founding role in the documentary, "Simply Raw: Reversing Diabetes in 30 Days" and is the writer-director of "EcoParque." He now distributes approximately 50 film, ebook, and audio titles through YoelMedia.com. He manages a holistic health practice, facilitates local and online natural wellness and spiritual growth programs, and juices regularly. He helps people live in healthy homes, support their natural fertility, encourage their optimal nutrition, and come into their full presence. He is the Co-Director of Tree of Life - Bay Area, and he has an MA in Live-Food and Spiritual Nutrition from the Cousens School of Holistic Wellness. Bedar's BS from UCSD is an interdisciplinary concentration of Environmental Chemistry, Law and Society, and Design Anthropology.
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