Maggie's Farm

One afternoon about 35 years ago I was in a graduate American History course at the University of Michigan taught by Shaw Livermore, a wonderful man, and he asked the question: "How can you have self-government, if you cannot govern yourselves?"

It was perhaps the beginning of my conversion.

I was therefor thrilled to hear President Bush say in his Second Inaugural:

In America's ideal of freedom, the public interest depends on private character - on integrity, and tolerance toward others, and the rule of conscience in our own lives. Self-government relies, in the end, on the governing of the self. That edifice of character is built in families, supported by communities with standards, and sustained in our national life by the truths of Sinai, the Sermon on the Mount, the words of the Koran, and the varied faiths of our people. Americans move forward in every generation by reaffirming all that is good and true that came before - ideals of justice and conduct that are the same yesterday, today, and forever.

"Men can never escape being governed. Either they must govern themselves or they must submit to being governed by others."

http://www.theodoreroosevelt.org/life/quotes.htm Jamestown, VA, April 26, 1907