Common Sense vs. Common Senseless - How Thomas Paine Can Be Applied To Modern Day; Part One

INTRODUCTION

PERHAPS the sentiments contained in the following pages, are not yet sufficiently fashionable to procure them general favor; a long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defence of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason.

You don't want to hear this, you are content in your general ignorance. You have been brainwashed into thinking that your personal views are the only correct views so any dissent makes you uncomfortable, if not down right irritable. However, after the initial shock that world does not revolve around you has worn off, and you begin to see you do not get to dictate to the world how it should live and what everyone should believe, you will begin to open you mind to the possibility that maybe, just maybe, you are not right all the time.

As a long and violent abuse of power, is generally the Means of calling the right of it in question (and in Matters too which might never have been thought of, had not the Sufferers been aggravated into the inquiry) and as the King of England hath undertaken in his own Right, to support the Parliament in what he calls Theirs, and as the good people of this country are grievously oppressed by the combination, they have an undoubted privilege to inquire into the pretensions of both, and equally to reject the usurpations of either.

As long as "We the People?" stand aside and do nothing as fellow Americans are having their right trampled upon, as long as we watch in silence as the hammer of our might is wretched from the people, wielded to create pale reflections of what we think we are by careless, clumsy and brutal hands, as long as we stand aside and allow those who are our representatives to the world act with disdain towards the trillions of other inhabitants of this earth we must all share we are implicit co-conspirators in their tyranny, enablers of injustice both at home and abroad. We cannot sit idly by and watch our power, the people's power, taken away and given to a group of so-called representatives with little to no clue of how the average person lives, how we survive.

In the following sheets, the author hath studiously avoided every thing which is personal among ourselves. Compliments as well as censure to individuals make no part thereof. The wise, and the worthy, need not the triumph of a pamphlet; and those whose sentiments are injudicious, or unfriendly, will cease of themselves unless too much pains are bestowed upon their conversion.

I do not seek to sway political views. My incongruity is with the powers that be on all sides. I wish to remind my fellow Americans of the things that unite us as a people. I wish to open your minds to the possibilities of all we still could be. It is this authors' humble opinion that our political parties are necessary, both right and left, to compliment and balance one another, in order to ensure that all people are represented and all values devotedly held are worth fighting for and should be fought for.

I am just an average conservative hippie veteran living in a very blue pocket of a very red state.