BE SURE TO VISIT THE ALL NEW DOUG'S DAILY MEDITATION PAGE
Facebook censored my old Meditation Page, due to the following Meditation about Ben Franklin; it was more or less a bash against excessive government control, our legal system, the way Republicans tend to say one thing and do entirely another and so on. Not only did they censor it, but I can post nothing new, even single words like "testing". As soon as I refresh the page, the new post is gone.
I guess it's OK: there should probably be one site without a bunch of crazy political trolls plying their wares. Here's what caused them to Censor me:
Franklin takes his son William to a park where they fly a kite with a key attached to it in a mild storm. A policeman sees Ben as Ben encourages his son to get the kite higher into the clouds so that they might see if electricity will run down the string and shock them. The policeman is shocked by Ben’s cavalier disregard for his son’s well-being, and Franklin is arrested on charges of culpable negligence and the reckless endangerment of his son. He is convicted and sentenced to six years hard time with a chance of parole after three.
William is sent to Boston to live with his Grandparents who eek out a living making candles from sheep fat. Just a month after William’s arrival, the shop is raided and his grandparents are charged with using animal products to make consumer items without a USDA permit. Their property is seized, their bank accounts frozen, they are fined $250,000.00 and, after 72 hours in separate holding cells in a nearby jail, they are let onto the street. Most of the cash they entered jail with is gone because they have been charged $40.00 per night each for their stay in their holding cells. After several nights in a shelter for the homeless, they begin to receive welfare and food stamps and are housed in a crack hotel in Jamaica Plains. Also discovered is the fact that the elder Franklins kept Billy out of school to help make candles. And although they schooled him very well themselves, they are found in Violation of Guardian Responsibilities, the news tells stories of them as suspected terrorists, and William is put into foster care. They are fined an additional $125,000.00 for their negligence as Guardians.. They attempt, month after month, to file suit for wrongful seizure, but since no charge has been officially filed against them, their public defender tells them that it is very difficult to file suit against any government agency when, in fact, that agency has not broken the law; it is also, says the public defender, impossible to file a counter-suit when they themselves have not been charged, nor had a suit filed against them. However, the public defender says, attempting to cheer them up, it may be possible to have some of the fines defrayed by the value of their seized property.
William’s foster parents, it is discovered too late, are scam artists. After being arrested a year later in Las Vegas, they confess to having left Billy asleep at the bottom of a highway embankment somewhere in Utah. In prison, Ben sees his son’s face, for the last time, in a picture on the side of a milk carton.
Finally paroled after four years, Franklin starts a magazine for farmers giving advice on weather conditions for the planting of crops and so forth. He is embraced by the Coalition of Organic Farmers and goes to Washington to lobby for the ban of all vegetables genetically engineered for profit and an end to inhumane veal farming. He is taken under the wing of Thomas Jefferson and soon signs the constitution.
Back in Philadelphia, where a neighbor has tipped off the FBI to the comings and goings of what appear to be suspicious Muslims, Franklin’s printing office is raided and searched under warrant. Ben’s assistant Abdul is an American born Muslim, and there appears a small advertisement in the back of his magazine for exotic spices that may have a connection with a Muslim terrorist organization in Ocala, Florida. Ben and Abdul are both taken for questioning by Homeland Security. His house, land, and the printing shop are seized by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms due to suspicion of illegal possession of firearms. Franklin, it is found, owned a blunderbuss and a half-pound of black powder, both of his own, illegal, manufacture.
During his questioning, torture, and the investigation into his suspicious activities, Franklin is asked his stance on racial issues. Why, for example, if he were against slavery, did he not emphatically state this in the Constitution that he himself had approved and signed? He explains over and over again that his influence was minimal on the majority of the Founding Fathers, and that he and Jefferson were proud to at least have gotten into it the theory of equality if not its immediate practice. “And why,” he asks, “do I get the feeling I am here exactly because of my association with a man of color and his non-Christian beliefs?” Yet he has the sinking feeling that his intellect and answers are useless in his current situation.
It is also discovered by the investigation committee that Franklin spent some time in France shortly after he founded the University of Pennsylvania; it is supposed that while in France he had sexual relations with an Algerian woman. Franklin is deemed by Homeland Security to be an enemy of American Business and of the American People by endorsing non-standard agricultural practices through his magazine and in his person as a lobbyist; this and his apparent allegiance to a France that appears indifferent to America’s military doings, and his undeniable Algerian-Muslim connections leave Franklin to be detained indefinitely. He is convicted of Terrorism and the potential manufacture of Weapons of Mass Destruction, sentenced to prison for life, without parole, said sentence to begin after indefinite Homeland Security detention (he thinks, but is never certain, he is somehow in Cuba); he is also charged for the use, sale and purchase of slaves.
Although Franklin neither owned, sold nor bought slaves, it is found during a Congressional hearing that endorsing by merely writing against, but doing no action to inhibit others’ use, purchase and sale of slaves, is tantamount to using, owning and/or buying slaves one’s self.
Franklin never hears what became of Abdul.
Two years later in prison, he sees on a television news program that his beloved Constitution is under attack. How, the pretty but daffy looking anchorwoman asks, can we live by a creed written by criminals, criminals who sanction the discrimination of people on the basis of skin color and faith? The picture cuts to a man at a podium near the Washington Monument talking to a cheering crowd of thousands. “Who are we,” the man, the spokesman for the Return to Patriotism movement asks, “To judge anyone, be they Christian, Muslim or Jew, be they Black or White?” During a close-up of the man, Franklin suddenly recognizes him as the director of the investigation committee at Homeland Security that had questioned and tortured him. “We are right,” continues the spokesman/director, “not merely because of our legacy as Keepers of the Truth, but because we are the people who love Freedom, we, and those like us, are True Patriots, and those who love America the most.”
All material at Doug's Daily Meditation ©2014 Douglas C. Ferrin
William is sent to Boston to live with his Grandparents who eek out a living making candles from sheep fat. Just a month after William’s arrival, the shop is raided and his grandparents are charged with using animal products to make consumer items without a USDA permit. Their property is seized, their bank accounts frozen, they are fined $250,000.00 and, after 72 hours in separate holding cells in a nearby jail, they are let onto the street. Most of the cash they entered jail with is gone because they have been charged $40.00 per night each for their stay in their holding cells. After several nights in a shelter for the homeless, they begin to receive welfare and food stamps and are housed in a crack hotel in Jamaica Plains. Also discovered is the fact that the elder Franklins kept Billy out of school to help make candles. And although they schooled him very well themselves, they are found in Violation of Guardian Responsibilities, the news tells stories of them as suspected terrorists, and William is put into foster care. They are fined an additional $125,000.00 for their negligence as Guardians.. They attempt, month after month, to file suit for wrongful seizure, but since no charge has been officially filed against them, their public defender tells them that it is very difficult to file suit against any government agency when, in fact, that agency has not broken the law; it is also, says the public defender, impossible to file a counter-suit when they themselves have not been charged, nor had a suit filed against them. However, the public defender says, attempting to cheer them up, it may be possible to have some of the fines defrayed by the value of their seized property.
William’s foster parents, it is discovered too late, are scam artists. After being arrested a year later in Las Vegas, they confess to having left Billy asleep at the bottom of a highway embankment somewhere in Utah. In prison, Ben sees his son’s face, for the last time, in a picture on the side of a milk carton.
Finally paroled after four years, Franklin starts a magazine for farmers giving advice on weather conditions for the planting of crops and so forth. He is embraced by the Coalition of Organic Farmers and goes to Washington to lobby for the ban of all vegetables genetically engineered for profit and an end to inhumane veal farming. He is taken under the wing of Thomas Jefferson and soon signs the constitution.
Back in Philadelphia, where a neighbor has tipped off the FBI to the comings and goings of what appear to be suspicious Muslims, Franklin’s printing office is raided and searched under warrant. Ben’s assistant Abdul is an American born Muslim, and there appears a small advertisement in the back of his magazine for exotic spices that may have a connection with a Muslim terrorist organization in Ocala, Florida. Ben and Abdul are both taken for questioning by Homeland Security. His house, land, and the printing shop are seized by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms due to suspicion of illegal possession of firearms. Franklin, it is found, owned a blunderbuss and a half-pound of black powder, both of his own, illegal, manufacture.
During his questioning, torture, and the investigation into his suspicious activities, Franklin is asked his stance on racial issues. Why, for example, if he were against slavery, did he not emphatically state this in the Constitution that he himself had approved and signed? He explains over and over again that his influence was minimal on the majority of the Founding Fathers, and that he and Jefferson were proud to at least have gotten into it the theory of equality if not its immediate practice. “And why,” he asks, “do I get the feeling I am here exactly because of my association with a man of color and his non-Christian beliefs?” Yet he has the sinking feeling that his intellect and answers are useless in his current situation.
It is also discovered by the investigation committee that Franklin spent some time in France shortly after he founded the University of Pennsylvania; it is supposed that while in France he had sexual relations with an Algerian woman. Franklin is deemed by Homeland Security to be an enemy of American Business and of the American People by endorsing non-standard agricultural practices through his magazine and in his person as a lobbyist; this and his apparent allegiance to a France that appears indifferent to America’s military doings, and his undeniable Algerian-Muslim connections leave Franklin to be detained indefinitely. He is convicted of Terrorism and the potential manufacture of Weapons of Mass Destruction, sentenced to prison for life, without parole, said sentence to begin after indefinite Homeland Security detention (he thinks, but is never certain, he is somehow in Cuba); he is also charged for the use, sale and purchase of slaves.
Although Franklin neither owned, sold nor bought slaves, it is found during a Congressional hearing that endorsing by merely writing against, but doing no action to inhibit others’ use, purchase and sale of slaves, is tantamount to using, owning and/or buying slaves one’s self.
Franklin never hears what became of Abdul.
Two years later in prison, he sees on a television news program that his beloved Constitution is under attack. How, the pretty but daffy looking anchorwoman asks, can we live by a creed written by criminals, criminals who sanction the discrimination of people on the basis of skin color and faith? The picture cuts to a man at a podium near the Washington Monument talking to a cheering crowd of thousands. “Who are we,” the man, the spokesman for the Return to Patriotism movement asks, “To judge anyone, be they Christian, Muslim or Jew, be they Black or White?” During a close-up of the man, Franklin suddenly recognizes him as the director of the investigation committee at Homeland Security that had questioned and tortured him. “We are right,” continues the spokesman/director, “not merely because of our legacy as Keepers of the Truth, but because we are the people who love Freedom, we, and those like us, are True Patriots, and those who love America the most.”
All material at Doug's Daily Meditation ©2014 Douglas C. Ferrin
