Common Sense

greetings friends... hope you are well.    We've gone about 9 days here without rain... but it's raining now as we speak.  I want to talk about our country.  But it's hard because I've had to stop watching tv  due to stress.  Stress can raise blood glucose levels and make me sick.  But I don't have to read my BG meter to see that the news of the day,  or the "crisis de jour",  makes me sick.  To get rid of the feeling of the world falling apart,  I work on projects,  play a little guitar,  (actually my guitar is normal sized) maybe watch a Hallmark movie or read.  The media did show marchers saying "give me liberty or give me death"  and I told wife it was Thomas Paine that said that.  But I looked it up and it was Patrick Henry.  Both active Patriots in the American Revolution.  I read Thomas Paine's famous pamphlet from the era.  It was excellent.  The pamphlet was called "Common Sense" and I had read it in Jr. High.  Paine pushed back real hard on the Monarchy that was oppressing the colonists.  He talked about different forms of government.  And their various flaws.  Just like we all do today.  Paine  summed up all of my feelings about our country's problems with leadership, covid19, racial  strife,  economic inequality, and police brutality.  What I'm feeling is the same as many in our country.  He summed it up for me from 250 years ago.  In three words!   "I detest cruelty".                

In the course of my reading last night I wound up googling up the events and incidents that took place from 1770 to 1776 in the colonies.  There was the "stamp act".   There was the "Boston Massacre".   The Boston Tea Party,  etc.   But a year before the tea party there was the Gaspee incident  in Rhode Island.  A cool story about a sleek British Navy schooner that was chasing a patriot colonist vessel accused of defying revenue laws.  The British ship "Gaspee" ran aground on a sand bar in Narraganset Bay.  Some Patriots met and organized in a Tavern and before dawn when the tide would have set Gaspee free, 10 or 12 longboats went out and colonists boarded and  captured and burned Gaspee to the waterline.  This was about a year before the tea party.  As I read the story last night I noticed the date of the battle:  June 10th 1772.  Looked at the date on my computer screen.  June 10. !

                                                               LLITTY     :::::+:::::