“As long as mankind shall continue to bestow more liberal applause on their destroyers than on their benefactors, the thirst of military glory will ever be the vice of the most exalted characters.” -- Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol. I
To think that it has been two hundred and twenty eight years since that observation was made. So many have been the advances, so far have we traveled, how much cleaner are our streets now ... and how much we have forgotten, forgotten to remember. Santayana said that those who do not learn from the past are fated to repeat it. Lo, how our great and wondrous empire stretches and cracks at the seams, this great and mighty ship, this grand republic, festers and rots from within from its self-inflicted, neglected and overlooked wounds.
What price freedom? Is the individual or the state more important? These are indeed quite rapidly becoming Orwellian times, my friends.
