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Wolf: You’re very interested in happiness. Well, then this will definitely resonate for you; it certainly resonated for me. I was really stunned. I always... The thing that most Americans, including myself, know from the Declaration of Independence is that famous phrase “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
And, really, part of the fake democracy messaging and fake patriotism messaging is the notion that this is the most important part of the Declaration of Independence; and it’s kind of the essence of America. And that what it means is, we’re given the impression what it means is, you know, you can be a biker dude and I can be playing bridge and we’ll just leave each other alone, or you can consume in this part of the mall at Talbot’s and I’ll consume in that part of the mall at Victoria’s Secret and we’ll just leave each other alone; and we’ll all consume together, or we’ll meet our own personal goals side by side.
And that’s totally not... First of all, that’s not what happiness meant in the 18th century, to the people who drafted this beautiful document. What happiness meant in the 18th century has much more of a sense of using your faculties to the highest point in a context of freedom to serve the greatest good. It’s a sense of devotion and harmony and service.
That blew my mind, because I think Americans really aren’t happy right now, and I think one reason they’re not happy is that the definition of happiness we’re given is all about consuming and personal gratification; whereas... I think another reason that American’s are not happy is that we’ve fallen away from this extraordinary ideal that we’re supposed to carry of being this nation that embodies justice, and the rule of law, and liberty – that each of us, individually is supposed to carry, not that our leaders are supposed to do it for us.
And so, then, moving on to the next paragraph, it’s so mind-blowing, too, because, as I say, you’re never taught this, but, as I mentioned, it’s like an absolute, categorical demand that you have to hold your government accountable when it goes astray. So... I never will read the Declaration of Independence the same way again.
Kall: Yes, you’ve really turned it from something that is stale... as you’ve described it, as an illegible piece of parchment that is shown as a picture, not a living document, in history books... you’ve turned it into something that is vital, that calls upon people to reach for the best within themselves and for their country, which maybe is the ultimate form of patriotism.
Wolf: Well, that’s very kind, but truly, it was there; it was in there all along. I was amazed, going back to the research that I did for Give me Liberty, because it was a totally different picture of what this nation and what we are intended to be than I was ever taught in high school, or in college, or in graduate school. You know, the founding generation – and again, I didn’t just look at the well known white men whose names we’re all familiar with, but all these ordinary people, who were so on fire – they were doing things like... I’m not saying trying to stay home, but they were... you know, King George III’s tax collectors were oppressing them, breaking into homes without representation, without warrants, and they would dismantle the tax collector’s homes, brick by brick – there was not a brick standing.
When Washington went ahead and with the Jay Treaty and the people didn’t approve of it and they felt humiliated by it – there were riots up and down the Eastern seaboard. I mean, these people just did not shut up about liberty, even the most oppressed people, the enslaved African-Americans. I never knew this: there were many, many what were called “Freedom Feet” in the Colonial Era, when African-American slaves would sue the state legislatures for their freedom using the language that is the same language as that in the Declaration of Independence.
These people risked their lives to say, “You know what? This ideal belongs to all of us.” These are gutsy, gutsy people - and they categorically intended these seven core principles that we’ve been brainwashed to not carry in our hearts - things like ordinary people are supposed to run things; you have an obligation to dissent; you’re supposed to not have an established God, America does not establish a God over men and women because this is supposed to be national where you have freedom of conscience. They knew how corrupt it was when a state wraps its arms around a corrupt church and uses it to browbeat individuals. The people who started this country fled places where Puritans and Huguenots and Quakers were tortured or murdered by the state because of their religious beliefs.
You know, this reverence for the rule of law we’re supposed to have is one of the key principles; so that when Sarah Palin or the White House defies subpoenas, that says anything, that that's un-American. Finally, a core principle like the fact that we’re not supposed to have an oppressive empire subverting liberty around the world... that would’ve appalled the founders. The founders didn’t see America as owning liberty; they saw America as serving liberty, and that liberty was universal. So they would have been horrified at a situation where, since 1898, as long as we’ve had a measure of freedom at home, or most of us, we’ve turned a blind on the fact that business interests are sending our military around the world to subvert democratically-elected governments to install trusted dictators who oppress and torture and murder and silence the population exactly as the founders were oppressed by the greatest empire at that time on Earth. So these core values are so important for us to get back to at a time when there really is a war against citizens.
Kall: Absolutely. I just need to do a station ID. It’s the Rob Kall Bottom Up Radio Show, 1360 AM, WNJC. I’m on the phone now with Naomi Wolf, who is the author of Give Me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries. I mentioned in my e-mail to you, the name of the show is the Bottom Up Show, and it’s because I believe that we’re going through a bottom up revolution now. You hear it almost every day, Obama talking about it, it’s talked about it all the time on the Internet. The opposite of bottom up is top down; top down is when people are told “this is America, how wonderful it is,” rather than “everybody’s responsible for keeping America wonderful.” And I always like to ask my guests about their observations on bottom up ways of seeing, understanding, the world and its processes.
Wolf: Is that a question?
Kall: That’s a question, yes.
Wolf: Can you restate it? I didn’t quite hear it. Oh, you’re talking about bottom up ways of seeing the world and its progress?
Kall: Of seeing... particularly from your area of interest, of liberty, of democracy, of revolution.
Wolf: Well, it’s exactly about that. You could not be more in alignment with this basic message, if that’s your focus. We’ve been bombarded, again, with this messaging for a long time, that we should leave running the country to politicians, and we should leave the holding of the debates to Fox News and CNN, and we should leave writing the op-eds to the pundits (which is why I love OpEdNews), and that we should leave worrying about the Constitution to Constitutional scholars, and this is all wrong.
