DEAR READERS,
There’s much lip service paid these days, in certain circles, to common sense.
It’s a concept that was promoted by the Founder Thomas Paine in his brilliant pamphlets, the Tik Toks of their day.
Paine spoke to ordinary people, working stiffs, the majority of colonists that suffered the most from the predations of the British monarchy.
Paine’s clear and persuasive arguments for democracy, spelled out in COMMON SENSE, were read aloud in homes and taverns by a population parched for freedom.
I won’t presume to gild the rhetorical lily.
Paine called government a necessary evil. Today he’d likely drop the adjective.
He believed society was capable of creating and maintaining happiness, allowing people to live together in mutual support and cooperation, rather than in isolation. (He clearly had not met my family.)
He maintained that a civil society requires that all its people have a voice. He also had not encountered Marjorie Taylor Greene, despite her best efforts to be heard across the ages.
NO KINGS. He said it first. He said it better.
He decried monarchical, aristocratic and hereditary rule as tyranny.
He reviled the hegemony of the propertied few.
In his time, the wealthiest one and a half percent of colonists owned just under ten percent of everything, including, as they saw it, the people they enslaved.
I wonder what Paine would have to say about the nation today, in which the bottom ninety percent owns barely more than two percent of the wealth.
He would surely have harsh words for the Prosperity Gospel people.
He cleverly used the Bible to bolster his argument that all people are created equal.
“The Almighty has here entered his protest against monarchical government.”
Paine must have been channeling Nostradamus when he warned of SELF-APPOINTED monarchs doing “little more than making war…impoverishing the nation.”
“Of more worth is one honest man to society…than all the crowned ruffians that ever lived.”
He warned against concentrating power in the hands of a monarch or a dictator, which would “allow him to transcend any limitations placed upon him.”
Evidently, he had yet to hear of the Unitary Executive Theory.
Imagine his horror in discovering it now is supported by the Supreme Court.
Paine proposed a bold new law of the land—a Continental Charter—a structure for a democratic government, a bulwark against despotism.
The common sense of “radical democracy” proposed by Paine, a revolutionary idea born of the Enlightenment, predictably got pushback from the usual suspects.
The big-money corporations and the landed elite, (especially the slave ‘owning’ plantation Poobahs of the South), the clergy, the Loyalist toadies, all those most likely to have to cede power and wealth to the people of a democracy, those for whom the Great Unwashed majority existed merely to enrich them, freaked out.
Perhaps the Enlightenment was too woke for them.
The COMMON SENSE set out by Paine terrified them as it threatened their domination.
Paine was a fierce advocate for social justice, then an anachronism.
He argued for a social safety net, a welfare system so wise, so fair, so common sense, that the Social Security Administration today claims it modeled its system after Paine’s proposals.
Paine was a leading voice for equality, individual rights, fairness, and compassion in governance.
He was a champion of moral good.
He spoke out against oppression, authoritarianism, concentration of power and wealth in the hands of a few.
He envisioned a country that took care of its most vulnerable residents: the poor, the sick, the homeless, the aged, the very young, the prisoner, the stranger.
He believed that a just society took positive steps to eliminate poverty and gave every person a voice.
He supported the paradigm shifting notion, the common sense belief, that all people, ALL, had an inherent, natural born right to fair treatment and a voice.
Thomas Paine was an immigrant.
He was a political criminal and a prisoner in two countries.
He was an abolitionist.
He rejected dictatorial rule.
He reviled inherited wealth for the very few.
He advocated for common use of the land.
He was a Deist who rejected the oppression of institutionalized religions and their theocratic control.
He believed that a universal income, an equal vote, humanitarian programs under the law, were the basic rights of every person, and the responsibility of society to provide.
Thomas Paine helped to draft the Declaration of Independence that we celebrate today.
He planted the seed of the revolutionary ideas that birthed America, and he joins the pantheon of revolutionary thinkers we call our Founding Fathers.
Thomas Paine had a brain and a heart and a soul.
Thomas Paine had COMMON SENSE.
Do we?
HAPPY INDEPENDENCE DAY
YOUR IRISH GRANNY
Paine is the founder of all that's good and right in this country. Then there were compromises with the wrong'uns.