The Chapter on Benjamin Lay and his love of books and learning is particularly pertinent to the conflict between poetically powers adversarial to a free press that we are experiencing today.
In his attempts to shut down CNN and to pervert free expression by having his rich cronies buy up media outlets, Trump (whom I will NEVER call President) has made war on a basic American safe-guard, the Free Press. Even in Benjamin Lay's time, the mid 1700's the press was under attack in various ways. The Quaker hierarchy of the time suppressed all writing that was anti-slavery as the "meeting" had been overtaken by ministering "men of power" who acquired their wealth to a large measure by the trade in human flesh and the exploitation of the enslaved people. Therefore when any member of the faith attempted to expand the continuous protest against this evil, the speaker was silenced through censure in Meeting or denial of publication.
Fortunately then as now, there were those who respected and protected free speech and our own hero Benjamin Franklin published Benjamin Lay's great work against slavery and false ministry
I believe that great danger is from money and monopoly. Everyone understands censorship but we didn't anticipate that billionaire in protecting their wealth and the means by which they acquire it, as well as the protection of their treasure against taxation by off-shore accounts - as pirates buried their treasure in the Carribbean, that these billionaires would buy and monopolize media and pervert it to their own uses. Hence, Fox news. And the attempted purchase and perversion of CNN that was recently foiled. Next the loss of Net Neutrality is a danger to us. Well voices for truth and justice have aways found a way to make themselves heard and I have faith that will continue to be the case in this war between Good and Evil.
My view of this is that Good is for the greater good of all people, and it is loving and compassionate, that it protects and supports the poor and needy, the weakest, and most vulnerable of our society. Evil is the pursuit of amassed riches, the exploitation of the poor the needy and the vulnerable, the misuse and abuse of people and animals, the setting off of some people as inferior because of color or religion or place of origin. These sides are pretty clear in today's political climate. One leader refuses to pay taxes, hides his money, brags of abusing women, denied his workers their fair pay in New York, and attacks the free press while throwing open the gates to the destruction of our planet by wealth seeking businessmen who wish to destroy our mountain tops by blasting them, poisoning our streams with pollutants, encroaching even further and faster upon those few natural lands left to us, and exploiting the workers at the same time.
If Benjamin Lay were alive today, I think I know where he would stand.
Happy Trails - enjoy the wood while you can - soon the various pipelines (through the pines as well as under the river of the invaded Dakota native American lands) will have polluted and laid waste to those woods.
In History our great war against evil was the war against the exploitation of our colony by the King, the war against enslavement of people, and now it is the war against the waste of our land by blind pursuit of individual wealth seekers. They don't care what they do to our land in their avid urge to gather as much money as they can and hide it.
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