Thesis Statement

(The thoughts of a young American man on the state of a nation…)

We used to live in a country where no standing monument could compare to our spirit, where, if you were an artist, you were nothing until you could do a perfect Lincoln, where anything was possible, if you were an American.

By no means am I saying that the old times were idyllic. Largely, and in most measurable respects, the times we live in now are better than they've ever been, and the reason people continue to flock to this country is because we are so prosperous. Our spirit, however, seems to have been crushed by the ones entrusted to serve us. Apathy, the greatest enemy of the people, the greatest ally of the pigopolist, has pervaded our national consciousness, and if it continues to grow as it has been for the past decades, this nation as we know it will simply cease to exist.

The presidency, thanks mostly to the current administration but also partly to the six or seven previous ones as well (Carter, while practically spineless in foreign affairs, was still a noble man with a good heart), has become the punchline to a most serious national joke. Even now we have a man in power that has been instructed to feel that "the American people are safer." Apparently the criteria for this assumption is based on the strength of both reiteration and talking points distributed to media outlets that are nearly indistinguishable from propaganda machines. Facts? Forget about 'em!

There is one definite thing that has declined since the old times: the President used to be someone to be admired, someone to look up to, someone to try to be like, a person to at least be respected, if not loved.

Tell that to a kid in 1988, for example and you might be accused of child abuse. I'm talking about a man who couldn't even be bothered to pretend to care about the offices he walked into based on his celebrity (once as a movie star, once as a Governor), who put on a dim, mumbling, almost senile façade for the public while he used an absolutely ruthless killer instinct in all matters in private. Selling weapons to Iran to fund an illegal war in Nicaragua, training the Afghani Mujahideen who fought the Soviets and later attacked us, arming Saddam Hussein with chemical weapons and the 'regime change' in Panama are all excellent examples of this man not only knowing full well what awesome power the office holds, but how to manipulate it to try to covertly control global affairs. But, since this is not about the Reagan Dynasty and how many felony prosecutions it caused, I digress…

I'm also still not sure that Congress has ever worked. Bicameral legislation, while supposedly giving independent voice to both the states and the people, is firstly hiding behind itself, where one house can propose a bill that the people want but that harms the interests of the parties at large and the other can silently kill it, blaming the death of yet another good idea on 'politics,' Second, because of PACs and lobbyists, we no longer have a government "of, for and by the people," we have one that's at least partly 'of, for and by the businesses.' Also known as: 'special interests.'

Last time I checked, such an intimate liaison between business and government, at the expense of liberty and privacy of the individual, was called 'Fascism,' the type of government Hitler and Mussolini used.

I don't know a single person who puts trust in this government. Frankly, I'd be wary of anyone who does.

I do, however, have Faith in the system we live under, however tenuous it may be.

I have often considered fleeing the corruption, the problems, the waste, the nation itself, just because the mess seems insurmountable. But, when I think of the literal miracles Washington was involved in (having coats he was wearing and horses he was riding riddled with bullets but always escaping injury, not making himself emperor of America when most people would've supported his dynasty, and making America the only republic in history to have a revolution that didn't collapse into itself), about people like Lincoln and Susan B. Anthony and T.R. and JFK and RFK and MLK, about the American idealist who fought for his or her beliefs and for others, I always regress to one immutable truth:

We, the people of the United States of America, must make certain, by any means possible, that our government remains of, for, and by the people. This is not a right, this isn't even a responsibility, this is what I call the Curse of Liberty, that every person who lives under this idea of Democratic Republican Government must realize that if one does not step up and take part in the process, one becomes subject to the whims of the people who participate only to manipulate.

I am the grandson of two Polish peasant immigrants whose home town was annihilated by the aggression of the Weirmacht, and who were enslaved by Nazis as subhuman laborers. This happened because the people of Germany at the time were unwilling to take a stand or try to make a difference.

I, as a natural born citizen of these United States, cannot escape the Curse of my duties as an American. I shall do everything within my power to help realize America as the dream the Framers had.

I believe in very few things, for belief changes nothing, and fact is all that really matters. However, one of the few things I do truly believe in is that you should never complain about anything without also proposing a solution to that which you have problems with. What I will be proposing here are the ideas that keep my Faith in America.

In an effort to help perfect this Union, Nova America will address the problems the United States appears to have, and attempt to provide steps to be taken in order to resolve them.

Soap

According to the Internet, ancient Roman legend states that in the Sapo hills overlooking the banks of the Tiber river, sacrifices were made on altars constructed of wood. The offerings were ritually slaughtered, their carcasses, on pyres, put to the torch, and a foamy mixture of boiled animal fat and wood ash lye dripped their way the river. People who washed their clothes in this part of the river found that they would somehow get cleaner, and that's where we get the name for 'soap.'

Whether or not the Etruscans were burning animals or humans above the Tiber river to please the gods in their animistic pantheon, if this 'legend' is real, or if a terrain feature in Italy known as 'Sapo' even exists is not relevant. In fact, it's more likely that ancient peoples were regularly using the acid and ammonia content of their own urine to clean their clothes (among other things such as tanning hides to make leather, making saltpeter, and bleaching things), and that soap evolved more from a byproduct of food or leather processing.

The facts, however, are simple enough: In order to make soap, one must render fat, skim the tallow and glycerin, and add lye.

Soap makes your body and clothes and car clean and natural soap is the best thing for your skin.

Soap was once called "the yardstick of civilization" by a great philosopher, and indeed, as the Roman civilization declined, so too did the use of soap, replaced instead with the lies of perfume.

Soap, being a relatively soft substance, would be damaged or destroyed in transit if it were not properly protected. Sturdy wooden crates, soapboxes, were designed to protect them on the trip from the factory to the storefront.

The soapbox was a piece of theatre before the invention of radio or any other mass-market media, back when political candidates and other orators had to be masters of stagecraft in order to get any attention at all. Many promises, half-truths and outright lies have come from the tops of many 'soapboxes,' but usually those were from persons seeking office. I, however, have no such axe to grind.

Therefore I promise the following:
This will not be a largely reactionary weblog, nor will it be an E/N site, nor a Livejournal. I will never write about issues I think ought to be handled at a local level, issues that concern fame and celebrity for the sake of fame and celebrity, or issues that ought to be utterly forgotten. I will never type in ALL CAPS, I will never use any hard to read font, typeface or color, and I will not suffocate the reader with endless links to useless tidbits of knowledge that would be better sought in a Google search.

You will not read about my day-to-day life, though you may be exposed to the rare great events therein.

I will instead issue to the reader things that I consider important to hear and necessary to know. I will present these ideas in an easy-to-read format, and do my utmost best to make them easy to comprehend, even to the layperson. I will erect a sidebar of daily links that are necessary for my media intake. I will address only the things on my mind and the issues that relate to America at large, or that the mainstream media have overlooked or slanted, and I will always do my best.

My name is Joshua E Jansen, and this is my soapbox.