It was to the great credit of the then President of my University, Glen Creech, that he stood up to what was Fascism pure and simple, and abolished that system. We stand on the verge of global Empire, but as John Quincy Adams foresaw, we are no longer masters of our own souls. You are a worthy successor to that tradition. All of the politicos and media pundits will now blather on for months, perhaps years, about reform. Never matter that the System has grown more monstrous and more corrupt in the last century of progressive reform.
Empire is a slow cumulative process of corruption.
From the first critics in the Roman Republic around 202 B.C. to fall of the Eastern Empire as described Edward Gibbon, was a staggering 1655 years, and reformer after reformer failed in attempts to shape up the System. Many hold that the new technologies will do that, and I hope they are right. But, if so, that will be outside of this corrupt, statist political process. Some of my Southern friends talk of secession as an answer, and I wish them well in that endeavor. The Christians learned to survive in such a situation, so that by 150 AD they were feeding 1,500 of the destitute at a time when the government was incompetent to collect the garbage.