Here we are with our President squaring off against militia types who have only said if the federal government attacks the people they are ready to defend the people. The President these people have no right to say they love their country and despise their government. It is an interesting proposition despite the 1st amendment.
While I have not had the direct pleasure of reading first hand British texts on the Colonial Revolt of 1776 I can make some obvious surmises from that point of view. Consider the colonists would not submit to a tax imposed by the King.
Certainly that was unheard of be it on tea or not. Rather the colonial considered themselves British subjects but refused to involve themselves in the British / French conflict that was their national heritage for centuries and was continuing in the New World. Where was their loyalty?
And were they demanding change faster than possible? Parliament was gaining a majority on the side of the colonists. The king was ready to accede to their demands? What were those crazy conspiracy minded people doing declaring indenpence before the government had time to declare justice?
Obviously in the name of peace the King had to discourage dissent among the colonists. Keeping the peace was his duty. And those colonists refused to accept that duty and confine their talk to petitions to the crown. Rather they did the absurd thing and petitioned the people.
Worse yet, they refuse to accept internal reform and insisted that the people had the right to establish a government rather than leaving government to people who had been doing it for centuries. That may strike us as strange today but in a day still involved with hereditary rule appealing to those unlettered in government was even more strange.
But more to the point, those inflammatory fools who spoke against established government. They were considered as strange as those seeing black helicopters today. Seriously, the average British colonial governor cared not in the least to both "his" people if they were peaceful.
Simply the natural human inclination to "do no work" that is unnecessary would establish that. Oppression was not their intention as is spelled out in the Declaration of Independence. They were simply enforcing existing laws and policies. It was the colonials who were misinterpreting meaning and intention in order to foment revolution.
Given the small percentage of radicals initially in favor of revolution what was the justification for the few hotheads at Concord firing "the shot heard 'round the world"? In the view of history, the British Empire went on for 150 more years to become the largest and greatest in world history while the ex-colonies in North America struggled to become a force in the world in that same century and a half.
In other words, if the colonies had not been lead by hotheads, militia paranoids in this week's commentary, the colonies would have been part of that great empire. They would not have languished for 150 years in the backwater of the world fighting a lone fight against Latin America. They would have avoided their civil war by the outlawing of slavery in the 1830s. They would have been major players in WW I rather than suckered in late comers. The colonies would be a major force in the empire this day as it would not have fallen after WW II.
I have to ask how is our perspective of government today different from the perspective a militias today? There was no cause for revolution from the British perspective and there is no cause for revolution from the perspective of our current government. But then cause is in the eye of the beholder as well as it is in the eye of who writes the history.
It is certain that at the time of the US revolution there was the equivalent of the "black helicopters" circulating about British troops. To this day there are stories of British atrocities taken as fact that the British records report as accidents. (The Fort Trumbull massacre/accident for the history buffs, as an example.)
The temper of the times is that our most fiery speakers are on the front line and if by some quirk of fate they become the victors in the coming revolution then rest assured black helicopters like improper taxes will be taught to school children for generations before it is questioned. It would not matter at this point if either Ronald Reagan or George Washington were to come down on a militia movement if the militia movement won. The winner will write the history as much as if Shea had captured and hung Washington.
To bring this into focus in the last lines, President Clinton is drawing battle lines between us and them when the us and the them is only a matter of point of view. No matter how "right" the government feels it is, a sufficient number of people rejecting it as wrong regardless of the justification can prevail.
Drawing lines is the problem. We now have lines. Perhaps it will not be some damn fool thing in Waco but rather some damn fool thing in the White House which is as detached from reality as was the King of England some two hundred years ago.