Thema/Monday Open Post

This is Monday’s open trackback post here at third world county. Link to this post and track back. More below “Thema”.

This week I have planned posts on “Mending Walls: Faith, Part 3” and another tentatively titled, “Mending Walls: Public Education—The Carefully Considered Rape of the American Citizen’s Mind.” I suspect the rest of the twc posts this week, apart from those that are crossposts informational or simply for my own amusement, will be themed similarly, influenced by the following comment made by William James in his Dedication Speech for the Shaw Memorial (Robert Gould Shaw), Boston, May 31, 1897:

The deadliest enemies of nations are not their foreign foes; they always dwell within their borders. And from these internal enemies civilization is always in need of being saved. The nation blest above all nations is she in whom the civic genius of the people does the saving day by day, by acts without external picturesqueness; by speaking, writing, voting reasonably; by smiting corruption swiftly; by good temper between parties; by the people knowing true men when they see them, and preferring them as leaders to rabid partisans or empty quacks. Such nations have no need of wars to save them. Their accounts with righteousness are always even; and God’s judgments do not have to overtake them fitfully in bloody spasms and convulsions of the race.

I leave it to my readers to educe the theme.

Rabbit trail: read the whole speech. It’s a reminder of how much better a writer William James was than his brother, Henry.

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