This hard-hitting response to false statements about our nations values and ideals by rigid radical right-wing extremists unmasks their deceptions by using the actual words of the founding fathers-both brief quotations and longer passages. It pays tribute to the America you always knew was hidden behind smokescreens of rigid partisan ideological rhetoric and tells how to get it back. The spirits of Patrick Henry, Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, James Madison, Samuel Adams and others walk through these pages, telling you what they themselves thought said and meant. Throughout, the author asks you to think for yourself rather than accept his views or those of any party or partisan. This engaging work bares the origins of the widening gap between rich and poor, tells how religious imperialists are imposing their views on everyone, and lets the founding fathers speak directly to freedom, equality, justice, and other central values. It examines the Warfare State's never-ending aggression and beggaring of our nation's treasury, and the twisted view of liberty that places freedom for corporations above freedom for people. It reviews women's and African-American's past and present struggles for freedom. Remarks by historic and contemporary humorists lend a lighter touch. The book's three parts are: Democracy in Crisis; Dimensions of Our Concerns; and Heal Yourself, Heal the Nation, Heal The World. Each chapter is arranged around a foundation stone of democracy that is under siege today. Each starts with an orienting paragraph, moves into the quotations that are its central feature, then provides the author's comments and solutions. It challenges you to help rescue the America that most of us know and loved from the quicksands of right-wing ideology that now threaten it.
About the Author: Victor Daniels is Professor Emeritus of the California State University, where after earning a Ph.D. in psychology from UCLA, he taught for 40 years and also served as Psychology Department Chair. Later he trained in Gestalt Therapy. Outraged by directions our nation has taken in the last half-century, he felt compelled to write this book to dispel widespread misconceptions about the views of the U.S. founding fathers and what has happened since their time. Married for 34 years, with two adult children, he now spends his time writing, tending a small orchard, and carrying out ongoing woodsman's and erosion control projects along the creek that flows near his home. Born in a small mining town in northwestern Utah, he grew up in Utah, Nebraska, Florida, California, and on and around Army posts and Air Force bases in Germany, France, and England where his parents worked during the period after World War II. As a result of spending his childhood in four countries, he developed a sense of perspective that is hard to come by when you grow up in just one. After completing his Ph.D., he was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Chile during the term of President Eduardo Frei Montalva, the president who preceded Salvador Allende, before the fascist General Pinochet murdered the latter and set up a terror-based dictatorship to replace Chile's democracy (which has since been restored). He has previously written Matrix Meditations (with K.N. Daniels); Tarot d'Amour, (also with K.N. Daniels); Being & Caring: A Psychology for Living (with L.J. Horowitz); and numerous online articles on Gestalt Therapy.