Thinking ahead to the 250th

 It appears we are going ahead with plans for the 250^th anniversary of the country, despite the campaign to undermine the country itself.

Perhaps in planning next year’s celebrations we could use a quotation from H.L. Mencken as our motto:

 

Liberty, if it means anything at all, means that body of rights which the citizen reserves to himself, even as against the government. … Thus a conflict is set up between the rights of the citizen and the power and security of the government. In so far as the citizen prevails the government is weak, and in so far as the government prevails the citizen is not a citizen at all, but a subject.

 

The powers claimed by the current occupant of the White House reduce citizens to something less.

• Source: The quotation is from an article H.L. Mencken wrote for The Chicago Sunday Tribune in 1926. I found it mentioned in notes in Library of America’s “Story of the Week.”

https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2010/09/nature-of-liberty.html