I am not fond of being told more than once or twice that I am doing something wrong. Tell me once and that should do. Pretty stupid way to live if you ask me. But I like stupid sometimes, gets the naysayers off my back I suppose. It’s a strange thing than that I tend to like history. History goes on and on about the same things. Tell one story and a few years later you can tell the same story with a different cast of characters and a different location. That’s history. We tend to collate the stories according to current issues and then try to use the history or repeated stories to influence our circle in a certain direction.
I tend to think that at the very basic level of existence, we all, including the natural world want to be empowered, energized, capable of living well and hardily. Power, to put it simply. Many things play into how much power one person can have and will they ever have enough to be satisfied. Money, strength, ambition, governement, culture, all this and much more influence how powerful the individual feels.
In the early days of the American west as we know it, many people, native and European sought out the west in order to exercise their self determination. They had as much power as they could train into their bodies and minds. Some became more powerful as they formed into groups or tribes of native peoples, others became more powerful as they fled all society entirely, leaving behind those that could exercise power over them. So you have native tribes and mountain men as it were.
As time and population catch up with us, power becomes shared. And not long after that, power becomes controverted. Laws arise to redistribute power and control and more laws follow. Then other powerful people are sworn in as officials in some manner and they enforce the power distribution grid. Today, we have many people that enforce this grid, lawyers, law makers, police, sheriffs, politicians, and quite a few more.
When the number of power brokers outlpace the number of those that feel less powerful, things seem to grow tense.
One such story in history is Shays Rebellion. It’s simple story. Soldiers fight in war in Massachusetts, Lexington, Bunker Hill and more. They go home after the war, their farms are in debt, the local government is attempting to enforce the collection of that debt and has to form its own militia to put down a rebellion by one of those soldiers, named Shay. Shay was patriotic, hard working, not well educated, but skilled in basic ways and should have been able to keep on farming. But he was not paid in full for his war time service and he was not alone.
Not having enough money to keep his farm going was the equivalent for him of being powerless. One branch of local government was trying to take his livelihood or power away from him and another brach, ineffective as it was was supposed to help him regain some of that power.
Read up on Shays’ Rebellion for your history lesson and you’ll probably notice that history repeats because we have many people in this large country in the same or similar positions today.
There is a good deal of evidence and scholarship that suggests that we wrote our US Constitution on the coattails of Shays’ Rebellion. The federal government was too weak to make a difference in their living conditons, even too weak to put down the uprising. So Hamilton, Adams, Jefferson, Washington and others felt we needed to move more power to the Federation or Federal government, which by many accounts was quite weak and feckless.
It’s the same old story really, about power. Who has it and who wields it. There are times when the word power seems to be a bad word. That is, until you realize you don’t have much of it. The question is, will we learn about these times of power transition or will we slip into something more fragile and feckless. Here is a quote from historian Ricks.
The Shays affair effectively set the table for the Constituional Convention by highlighting the ineffectiveness and fragility of the existing system. “It may, in fact, be difficult to overemphasize the degree to which this rebellion jolted American political reflections,” Writes the historian John Agresto. First Principles, Thomas E. Ricks
History repeats I believe, don’t you? If so, what are we learning today from history that we need to put into current practice? You have my permission to tell me over and over again, just don’t go to far overboard.