“These are the times that try men’s souls”
I confess I haven’t read Thomas Paine’s The American Crisis, but I’m working so much on opposing coercion and tyranny, I keep coming across him. I’m trying to learn more about the conditions that led to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
Learning history is one thing. Getting inside the hearts and minds of the people acting is another. What values were they acting on or not?
If you see pollution and depletion as destroying life, liberty, and property, then you see much of our culture as depriving people of freedom. It creates tyranny, what this country was founded to oppose, yet it’s everywhere. It pervades so much, few have the insight, vision, or courage to oppose it. They benefit from it.
With that view, Paine’s opening words resonate today:
THESE are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated.
Our world has a lot of summer soldiers and sunshine patriots. They look the other way while they act in imperialist ways. Things that require taking or destroying others land like using plastic or burning fossil fuels seem irrevocably imperialist because you can’t keep their poisons from reaching others’ territories and bodies.
We could use more freedom. Since we act as if we prefer the perks of being at the top of a dominance hierarchy, we keep squandering it in favor of market share and GDP growth instead.
I’m confident we’ll prefer freedom and liberty to those perks. We’ll also prefer a natural environment that’s healthier, cleaner, safer, and, in my opinion, more beautiful
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