Traitors "R" Us

I worry, not so much about governments in power but about how their actions/decisions are being assessed and addressed by the citizens, that is, assuming that the citizens are even paying attention for more than three seconds. We are quick to blame our leaders for their failures but we forget that they need guidance also. Choosing to remain blissfully ignorant is also a form of treachery.

"A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to be feared. The traitor is the plague. " ---Marcus Tullius Cicero [42 B.C.E.]
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"Patria est communis omnium parens" - Our native land is the common parent of us all. Keep it beautiful, make it even more so.

Blessed is all of creation
Blessed be my beautiful people
Blessed be the day of our awakening
Blessed is my country
Blessed are her patient hills.

Mweh ka allay!
Guanaguanare

2 comments:

louis said...

How prophetic of the current state of affairs! Cicero could have been writing about the Tea Party, about the super rich and anti-environmental interests that create fake pro-ordinary folk and "grass roots" environmental groups to hijack and undermine the genuine movements, even to feigning the appropriate faces and accents in the form of buying stock photos and hiring actors for their tv ads.

Guanaguanare said...

Thanks so much you for your comment! Yes, Louis, and to think that this was noted in 42 B.C.E.! That should settle any messianic urge that might arise to try and change the world. Seriously, Louis, what really has changed? And if things remain essentially the same, despite the system's protoplasmic bulges and retreats and the unending rearrangements that give the appearance of "progress," why do we persist?
Blessings