I think too often modern interpreters have been far too liberal to some of our better known prophets. Whether we’re talking about Isaiah, Nostradamus, or any other popular prophet,. I think far too often we shape history, rather than history shaping us, in order to form and force historical facts and circumstances into a kind of template to better fit whatever prophecy is the “Prophetic Flavor-of-the-Week.” Enthusiasm is fine for insurance salesmen, but I think historians need to focus more on specificity, especially when they wander off the facts of history and into the realm of probabilities. History is not elastic, nor does it hold together well when you stretch it over a thin lattice-work of speculation and possibility. However, in spite of this all too common propensity, there are a few prophets throughout the pages of history who seem to be so specific in the careful wordings of their prophecies as to be truly uncanny with the accuracies of their predictions. Though, a few of these would not be immediately recognized or known for their prophecies, but rather more for their own great and noble parts which they played in the actual making of history. Specifically, I am referring to three of that elite group who are most often referred to as “Our Founding Fathers of the U.S..”
Unfortunately, other than a few oblique, and often denigrating comments about religion in general, very little is actually known about the mystical inclinations — or perhaps even the lack thereof— of Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and George Washington, but one thing becomes glaringly clear to anyone who delves deeply into the prophetic words they spoke and wrote over two-hundred and twenty years ago, which is that each of these venerable patricians possessed the gift of foreknowledge of events yet to come. All three seemed to know in some mystical, first-hand way of a vicarious psychic insight and vision of actual scenes and events that we are now living witnesses to the circumstances they so accurately predicted and forewarned of, in very specific and clear detail.
Reading the papers and letters of these unique and singularly talented men, you begin to get a remarkable image of not only great statesmen, but the strangest feeling that you are reading the predictions, not only of mere historical figures in the founding of the United States, but perhaps even more importantly, the words of great prophets as well, men who were definitely endowed with a special gift for seeing into the future, exactly like the prophets of the Old Testament Not only do their foreboding and ominous words sound as if they were written just last week, but also you come away with the distinct, and somewhat uncomfortable, awareness that these great patriarchs of freedom, so responsible for directly founding the United States and its Constitution, knew exactly what would eventually happen to this country, especially concerning events that have recently taken place since 9/11, regarding the erosion of our personal freedoms and the safety of our future in a world without democracy, a world without America, at least as most of us knew,… and loved it.
Any intuitive person who happens also to value true freedom, cannot help but form an image somewhere on the back screen of their intuitive mind of the gradual descent and steady ebb of the United States government towards totalitarianism. This seems such an obvious statement to make — at least to anyone who has not been asleep for the last ten or twelve years — that it almost sounds redundant to even comment on it. We are so used to its obviousness that we are tempted to say, “Oh! Yes, I know all about that” and then drop the whole matter, going on rather with whatever other trivia might have captured our imagination temporarily.. Unfortunately, it is this very malaise of indifference that will seal and secure our fate and our loss of freedom. Shout it from the rooftops, as many are, indeed, doing today, but most Americans, for some strange reason , simply will not heed the warning, and much like the Germans in the nineteen thirties, will only do so when it is entirely too late.
Not only have totalitarian means and methods breached the Great Wall of Freedom, whose foundation was laid, brick by brick, by these prophetic and auspicious Founding Fathers, but the oppressors and the means for the eventual implementation of their ultimate power have been coming through small chinks in that Wall, and right into the center of American life — totally and openly under the noses of almost three-hundred million Americans— as quietly and adroitly as a convoy of alley rats slinking and slipping up the back wall of an inner city boarding house. While rats coming up a back wall, even at night might be somewhat inconspicuous, inured as city dwellers are to the conspicuousness of rats in a never ending line of small and seemingly inconsequential black bodies; likewise, these “Freedom Snatchers” have tried to remain just as inconspicuous, in their never ending line of seemingly inconsequential little black circumstances.. But evidently, as you will soon see, our Founding Fathers actually knew about and predicted just these same scenarios and circumstances when the days — these days — would come that freedom, true freedom, as they had just won with the Revolution, would be no more than a passing footnote in history, a brief historical comment about an ancient failed experiment, called, “democracy in America.”
Any halfway aware and awake individual, just reading the papers, watching CNN, or hearing the news, even in some half-hearted way, from any other source, cannot help but come away with that a strange, foreboding awareness, rising up in the back corners of your consciousness, as well as up the back of your neck, making the hairs on your neck to stand up, like sentinel soldiers, silent advance guards,, psychically warning that all is not well with our government and the people who run it.
I guess, at least to some extent, anyway, one can see how and why most Americans, in spite of all that is happening right under their noses and in their own front yard still, though, don’t believe that anything could possibly ever happen to deny us our birthright of freedom and justice for all. I mean, just look out your window, and there, all seems normal, all seems fine; America is still there; the green grass still grows and there are no black booted, swastika emblazoned uniforms goose-stepping up your street; and the sun still shines as bright and beautiful as ever with warm rays of heavenly reassurance; and indeed, the flowers all seemed to bloom last Spring; and, as the song says, “We still wave Old Glory down at the court house”,… over the land of the free and the home brave; but still — God help us — your mind simply will not hush its constant, susurrant and sibilant murmuring, stomping its feet and demanding answers to incessant, never ending questions that are always the same — like a drunk that simply will not, for the love of God, shut up, still asking the same question over and over again:
“Yes, yes… but for how long…,for how long,… and at what price… in the end,…at what price?”
If we stop for just a moment in our hurried and ill-conceived rush towards protecting ourselves at all costs from terrorists threats, whether real, imagined, perceived, or even, contrived, and consider everything that has happened in this country, especially with regard to this tendency of our government in its unhealthy, innocent looking enough direction towards the abdication of our birthright to personal freedom, ever how well-meaning the imposition — or not — then we might see an entirely different image, as well as derive from it all, an entirely different message, if not, indeed, a long, loud, and lingering siren of immanent danger and advance warning. Strangely, as I have already said, our Founding Fathers somehow knew and sensed this now immanent danger, well over two centuries ago.
Reading again, the ominous, portentous, and prophetic words of Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and George Washington, one cannot help but get the strange, almost mystical, notion that these distinguished men did, indeed, have some special supernatural pre-sight, somehow divinely granted to them by virtue of their great and unselfish deeds for humanity as a whole.
Does not each of the following quotes sound almost as if they were written only a few days ago — not by founding Fathers, ever how venerable and distinguished that in itself might truly be, but rather by three old testament prophets, bearded, wise, and endowed with inexplicable, supernatural foreknowledge?
Stop for just a moment and carefully weigh the following words of James Madison, written over two centuries ago, against the recent events in our country, events that have developed since the 9/11 tragedy, including the passage of such euphemistic sounding bills as the”Patriot Act,” or the sweet and comforting, Big-Brotherly sound of the term,” Department of Homeland Security.” A person would almost be inclined to believe — did they not for a fact know better — that Mr. Madison must have had clairvoyant, advance-viewing or a direct, psychic connection to CNN in twenty-first century Atlanta when he said,
“If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy”
In another of his quotes, one gets the feeling that Mr. Madison knew all about the actions of one of his future successors to the presidency, when he said:
“The executive has no right, in any case, to decide the question, whether there is or is not cause for declaring war.”
George Washington was even more specific on this point, almost as if he had a pre-vision of some of the questionable activities of his twenty-first century successor, who also would be known, coincidentally, as “George W.”, when he said, concerning the same issue of who has the right to initiate a war, Congress or the President:
“The constitution vests the power of declaring war in Congress; therefore no offensive expedition of importance can be undertaken until after they shall have deliberated upon the subject and authorized such a measure”.
It would appear from Mr. Madison’s 220 year old words that he knew all about the instruments of the Patriot Act, long before they would be enacted by a shivering, knee-knocking, intimidated, and weak Congress, when he said:
“The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become the instruments of tyranny at home.’
And Mr. Madison’s ominous and terse prediction for the final destiny of the land of the free, the home of the brave should strike lightening in the hearts of every man, woman, and child in the United States, and for that matter even, around the world;
“Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There is never a democracy that did not commit suicide.”
Having just concluded a war with Great Britain, Thomas Jefferson seemed to have an eerie foreknowledge that we still were not finished with the British problem, in addition to being seemingly aware of the founding of British Petroleum, long before its incorporation in 1954, when he prophesied:
“I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of the monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.”
George Washington seemed to have a clear fore-vision of the tendency of twenty-first century Americans, like the “good German” citizenry before them, in the 1930’s, to be easily carried away, hither and thither, by the inertia of unbridled patriotism, while there lurks beneath it all the most sinister plots to ultimately deprive them of the very freedoms they so patriotically rally to defend,, when he said:
“Guardagainst the impostures of pretended patriotism.”
America in the eighteenth century was a relatively slow-paced, peaceful, law-abiding country, but Thomas Jefferson’s prophetic mind saw the evolution of an entirely different America, an America of crime ridden streets and pervasive corruption at every level, when he correctly predicted,
“When we get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, we shall become as corrupt as Europe.”
And though the eighteenth century American military was only garrisoned to the strength necessary to guard the country in the eighteenth century, Washington evidently sensed a different American military of the future, one that would be disproportionately large as well as portending, as all large military establishments historically always have, of a threat and menace to the very ideals and causes of liberty and freedom:
“Over grown military establishments are under any form of government inauspicious to liberty, and are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty.”
And perhaps it was Jefferson who best expressed the final and most emphatic warning that should be tattooed on the forehead and across the heart of every American living who still cherishes the personal freedoms and individual liberties that are fast disappearing in the United States, all under the guise of “our best interest” and our “protection from terrorism”:
“Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.”