If you think that someone “stealing” 30 chicken nuggets from a company worth over 200 billion dollars is somehow an indication that they must also treat their loved ones poorly, you’re thinking far too simply about the complexity of human motivation. Amazingly, exploiting soulless corporations and hurting people are completely unrelated behaviors.
You seem to be under the impression that I think our democracy somehow makes us superior, or that it functions more often than others, when my point is pretty much the opposite: regardless of the governing system, people will not do enough to avoid a corrupt tyrant of a leader from coming into power, which they will then need to literally fight to overcome.
Rights are not earned through voting, but they are lost due to lack of voting, allowing corrupt leaders to roll back the hard-fought advancements. That’s what the quote means: the tree of liberty is refreshed with blood. White men own slaves? Fight to free them. Only white men can vote? Fight to achieve voting rights for everyone. Those were the times the tree of liberty was refreshed. We’re now seeing these rights called into question because of political leaders that we allowed to be voted in; our rights are slipping due to our insufficient use of the freedoms we fought for, inevitably leading to us needing to fight yet again to refresh them.
If democracy worked unerringly, we’d be more free than ever right now due to the fact that the vast majority of Americans can vote, and while I believe that would be true if everyone did vote, the fact of the matter is that they wont. That allows corrupt leaders to slowly achieve strategic positions in all levels of the government over time, and eventually use their power to bring in the Tyrant mentioned in the quote.
The only people I’m blaming for the regression of our rights and democracy are the tyrants tearing them down. Yes, if we had all voted they never would have gotten the power to do so, but my point has always been that that was never going to happen.
The height was when the vast majority of people understood the importance of informed voting, and did so with pride. We’ve never really been great in any other way, and even back then we weren’t all that great because we kept the right to vote from huge swaths of the people, but democracy functions when people vote, and it fails when they don’t.
The quote is that the tree is “refreshed” with blood, which is an important distinction. Also, Jefferson wrote it after the founding of the US - he understood that our democracy is not an exception to this cycle.
Yes, if we all did our civic duty not just to vote, but to actually inform ourselves about the choices, we’d be able to maintain democracy potentially indefinitely, but the reality is that a huge portion of people are complacent, and won’t take even the simplest of actions until they’re forced to. So, democracy degrades slowly as it’s desperately propped up by the few who understand its importance until it finally fails enough to start really affecting the people who “aren’t really into politics,” by which point its too late to use sweat instead of blood.
We water the tree with the sweat of the few, but when that inevitably isn’t enough and it starts to wither, we refresh it with blood of the many.
My first date with my (now) wife featured us watching a movie after I showed her how to torrent it. It’s an easy way to parse through date prospects who are too hung up on corporate-defined ethics. I knew she was a catch when she was interested in the prospect of bypassing overpriced movie fees, rather than worrying about how some billion-dollar company was going to get my $10, like some other dates I’d had.