Paul Kurtz in Quote- Part 1

By Gary Berg-Cross

The thoughts of Paul Kurtz, one of America’s leading humanists, will be the topic of the Sept. 8^th 2012 WASH MDC-organized panel. As a preparation for this I thought it interesting to provide some Kurtz quotes. These reflect some of the many subjects Kurtz has commented on over a long career. As the author of several version of the “Humanist Manifesto, including the recent Neo-Humanist statement, he’s earned the title of a modern” father of secular humanism.” As a member of the American Humanist Association, and a long-time editor of its magazine, The Humanist, he contributed to the writing of Humanist Manifesto II in 1973, which was an update on the original which his mentor John Dewey co-authored. He served as editor-in-Chief of Free Inquiry and Chairman of the Council for Secular Humanism.

Below are some quotes from these and other sources.

Free Inquiry & Tolerance

"Free inquiry entails recognition of civil liberties as integral to its pursuit, that is, a free press, freedom of communication, the right to organize opposition parties and to join voluntary associations, and freedom to cultivate and publish the fruits of scientific, philosophical, artistic, literary, moral and religious freedom." 

"Free inquiry requires that we tolerate diversity of opinion and that we respect the right of individuals to express their beliefs, however unpopular they may be, without social or legal prohibition or fear of success."

Strategy and Criticism of Religion

I am not suggesting that we should not critically examine religious claims, especially where they are patently false, injurious, and destructive. The secular world constantly needs to be defended against those who would undermine it, and we need to responsibly examine the transcendental and moral claims of supernaturalism and criticize its pretensions—especially when they impinge on personal freedoms. (from Free Inquiry May 2004)

Freedom from Religion

A key point to recognize is that one does not have to be an atheist or agnostic in order to defend the separation principle. In the United States, most Protestant denominations defend separation, as do secular Jews, liberal Roman Catholics, Unitarians, and members of other denominations. Secular humanists have many allies in this great battle. Indeed, both liberals and conservatives, believers and unbelievers, have stood firmly in support of the First Amendment. (from Free Inquiry May 2004)

Humanism and Liberation of the Human Mind

“If God is dead. Humanism is alive.”

Most humans feel the transcendent temptation, the emotional drive to festoon the universe with large-scale meaning.

“There is a broader task that all those who believe in democratic secular humanist values will recognize, namely, the need to embark upon a long-term program of public education and enlightenment concerning the relevance of the secular outlook to the human condition.” 

from  the   Humanist Declaration

Humanism and "Secular Humanism

Secularism needs to be adapted to diverse cultural conditions if it is to gain ground. I submit that we cannot legislate secularism uberhaupt without recognizing the cultural traditions in which it emerges. Accordingly, multi-secularism seems to be the best strategy to pursue: that is, adapting secular ideas and values to the societies in which they arise.

The question that I wish to raise is: What is secularism and/or the secular society?

Among the secular values that emerge today is the compelling need to develop a new Planetary Ethics. Because we must share the Earth, no entity can any longer be allowed to attempt to impose an exclusive, doctrinaire religious creed on every man and woman. We live in a multicultural world in which multi-secularism needs to be developed—in which different forms of secularism need to be adapted to the diverse cultural traditions and contexts of specific societies. Thus, we need secularized Christianity, secularized Judaism, secularized Hinduism, and even secularized Islam; all are requisite for societies to be able to cope with their problems. (from Free Inquiry May 2004)

A New Enlightenment

If we are to usher in a New Enlightenment, we need to spell out new goals to be achieved in the future. I can only briefly suggest what these might entail:

•The New Enlightenment needs to defend secularism, that is, the separation of church and state and the secularization of values.

•It must be planetary in scope, applying to all members of the human family—thus it would develop a new planetary ethics.

•It would seek to develop the public appreciation of scientific methods of inquiry and the scientific outlook.

•It would emphasize the need to use reason to resolve social differences and to lessen the resort to violence on the national and international level.

•It would defend the protection and cultivation of democracy and human rights everywhere.

•It would seek to banish poverty and disease from all parts of the globe and to reduce the disparities in income and wealth by expanding the amount of wealth and income available.

•It would focus on education and persuasion as the best methods for achieving social change, and it would make education and cultural enrichment truly universal.

•It would seek to elevate taste and appreciation, to cultivate the best of which we are capable as human beings, to achieve excellence, and improve the quality of life.

•It would seek for all people to work together to deal with global problems such as the unmeasured growth of population, environmental hazards, and global warming.

•It would seek to cultivate individual freedom consonant with the rights of others.

•While it would respect diversity and multiculturalism, it would seek always to find common ground that we may share.

•It would encourage cultivation of open societies, equal access to the media, and freedom of inquiry and research.

•It would seek to go beyond the ancient religious, ethnic, and national moral prohibitions of the past and move on to new alternatives appropriate to the contemporary world, new ethical values and principles.

•It would seek to generate and expand equality before the law and equality of opportunity for all individuals.

•It would seek to develop cooperative efforts among all segments of the world to deal with common problems.

Finally, it would exude some optimism about the human prospect, some belief that the human condition can be progressively improved, and above all, express the resolve to do so. (Free Inquiry Editorial -October/November 2005 Vol. 25, No. 6)

Life, Happiness & World View

Life, when fully lived under a variety of cultural conditions, can be euphoric and optimistic; it can be a joy to experience and a wonder to behold.

It is not the "courage to be" that we must develop as much as the "courage to become." We are responsible for our destiny. The meaning of life is not located in some hidden crevice in the womb of nature but is created by free persons, who are aware that they are responsible for their own futures and have the courage to take this project into their own hands.

The meaning of life is not to be discovered only after death in some hidden, mysterious realm; on the contrary, it can be found by eating the succulent fruit of the Tree of Life and by living in the here and now as fully and creatively as we can

Ethics & Values

…since the Renaissance, secularity in the ethical domain has been growing in influence. Secularists do not look to salvation and confirmation of the afterlife as their overriding goal, but rather focus on temporal humanist values in the here and now—happiness, self-realization, joyful exuberance, creative endeavors and excellence, the actualization of the good life—not only for the individual but for the greater community. (from Free Inquiry May 2004)

Far from living in a moral vacuum, secular humanists “wish to encourage wherever possible the growth of moral awareness.” (The quote comes from “A Secular Humanist Declaration,” the Council for Secular Humanism’s founding document, authored by Paul Kurtz.)

“common moral decencies” (include) qualities including integrity, trustworthiness, benevolence, and fairness. These qualities are celebrated by almost every human religion, not because God ordained them, but because human beings cannot thrive in communities where these values are ignored.

Free Inquiry into Science

Not the least among secular values of course is free inquiry and freedom of scientific research, the very basis of science and technology. Religious censorship or limitation—such as that intelligent-design advocates seek to impose on scientific theories of evolution—is unacceptable. The free mind is vital for the open society. If one wants to pursue scientific inquiry, then one needs to abide by methodological naturalism: objective standards of evidence, rational coherence, and experimental testing are quite independent of the Bible or Qur’an. (from Free Inquiry April/May 2004)

Skepticism (The New York Times called him "a skeptic of everything but fact.")

"a skeptic is one who is willing to question any claim to truth, asking for clarity in definition, consistency in logic, and adequacy of evidence." Skepticism and Humanism by Paul Kurtz

“I would like to introduce another term into the equation, a description of the religious "unbeliever" that is more appropriate. One may simply say, "I am a skeptic." This is a classical philosophical position, yet I submit that it is still relevant today, for many people are deeply skeptical about religious claims.
Skepticism is widely employed in the sciences. Skeptics doubt theories or hypotheses unless they are able to verify them on adequate evidential grounds. The same is true among skeptical inquirers into religion. The skeptic in religion is not dogmatic, nor does he or she reject religious claims a priori; here or she is simply unable to accept the case for God unless it is supported by adequate evidence.” From Why I Am a Skeptic about Religious Claims

Life, Happiness & World View

As I see it, creative achievement is the very heart of the human enterprise. It typifies the human species as it has evolved, particularly over the past forty to fifty thousand years: leaving the life of the hunter and the nomad, developing agriculture and rural society, inventing industry and technology, building urban societies and a world community, breaking out of the earth's gravitational field, exploring the solar system and beyond. The destiny of humankind, of all people and of each person, is that they are condemned to invent what they will be - condemned if they are fearful but blessed if they welcome the great adventure. We are responsible in the last analysis, not simply for what we are, but for what we will become; and that is a source of either high excitement or distress. Free Inquiry magazine, Volume 18, Number 3.

Facing Death

…each person must face death: life has meaning only if we realize that it will end. It is in viewing one's life as a complete whole that one sees it for what it is: what I accomplished and did well; whether I fulfilled some of my dreams and plans; whether I enjoyed life, made friends, fell in love, worked for a beloved cause, and so forth. I should have no false hopes about death, but I should do what I can to ward it off. Indeed, health is a first condition if one is to live well. We must not be deluded by a belief in immortality but should face death realistically. A free person worships the creative life as the ultimate good. But when death comes, he or she will accept it with equanimity, if with sorrow; and he or she will realize that in the face of death the only thing that really counts is what has been the quality of life, and what has been given to or left for others.

Image Credits

Skeptic Card Trumps by Crispian Jago: http://crispian-jago.blogspot.com/2010/05/skeptic-trumps-paul-kurtz.html

Free Inquiry Cover: http://www.secularhumanism.org/index.php?section=fi&page=index_25_6

Statues of Freedom and Movements of Freedom: Differing Images

by Gary Berg-Cross

This past Friday, Oct 29, 2011 the iconic Statue of Liberty, Auguste Bartholdi's great work, turned 125 years old. Lady Liberty is based on the Libertas, the Roman goddess symbolizing“ freedom”. The history of the building of the statue is quiet interesting in itself and lots of papers have dusted off histories to refresh our memories including that the Statue was 10 years late in arriving and the arm and torch lay in NY for almost that time waiting for the body to arrive. The snippet below is from the Brooklyn Eagle, which is used to deliver as a boy. (Brooklyn housed many immigrants who poured across the Brooklyn Bridge and flowed in masses around City Hall Park, where the inaugural ceremony was held.)

Bartholdi went to his Paris studio, where he started on the statue’s arm and torch in hopes of having the lady raise her lamp at the start of the American centennial celebration in Philadelphia in 1876. The statue missed the opening, but the arm and torch arrived in time to become a major attraction. Meanwhile, Bartholdi needed an engineer to design his statue’s “skeleton.” Though its copper skin was quite thin, it was clear Lady Liberty would eventually weigh tons. The artist took on railroad bridge designer Gustave Eiffel to build an iron framework. Eiffel arranged the framework so it could be easily taken apart to ship across the ocean.

As the statue neared completion in France, funds for its pedestal ran out. Publisher Joseph Pulitzer, himself a Hungarian immigrant, ran editorials in The World calling for help. The poor and middle class answered, and the $1 and $2 donations mounted. In all, Americans gave $350,000 for the pedestal. Among those who helped were New York artists who organized an exhibition in 1883 and auctioned manuscripts by Bret Harte, Mark Twain and other writers. A poet named Emma Lazarus was asked to contribute a sonnet, which is mounted on a bronze plaque on the statue. She wrote a poem titled “The New Colossus,”…

In NY harbor this October there was lots of celebrate and at Friday's ceremony some125 candidates from 40 different countries, took the oath of citizenship, although some other “immigrants” may have feared attending due to a “papers please” attitude abroad in the lands. One thing the main stream media celebrated was the new high-tech gear - added in the form of five webcams. These are located inside her torch. Four of the cameras now point towards Ellis Island, Governors Island, Liberty Island and the Freedom Tower respectively, while the fifth gives viewers a unique look at the torch itself.

Roman ideas of a free Republic were popular in the founder’s time and so Libertas has served a symbol for some time. It is good to be reminded of her in these time, but the addition of those extra camera does serve to remind us of a few lingering issues of freedom. One is made by Roberto Lovato in his “Of America” blog who noted the increasing surveillance of ordinary citizens and not just at stop lights:

“Much is being made in the media about the “live web cams” that are part of the high-tech makeover of the Statue. Less (or not) reported are the dozens of infrared surveillance cameras, vibration sensors, experimental facial recognition monitors, and other now ubiquitous electronic surveillance devices that capture the image of visitors and send them to databases of national security agencies. The profits from this kind of multi-million dollar makeover of Liberty go to corporations invested in redefining freedom.”

If Big Brother is watching, videos by protestors and observers play an important role in getting the actual experience of current Freedom efforts, like the Occupy movement, out to the citizenry. In the early days of Occupy Wall Street (in the newly named Liberty Park) videos suggested that mainstream, corporate media wasn’t isn’t telling a fair or complete story about its aims, process, ideas or even its general schedule which is available online as shown below:

Occupy Wall Street (OWS) Agenda Sunday, October 30

3:30pm Multi-Faith Service

5:00pm What Is Wrong With Capitalism? Occupy Wall Street Forum w Alex Callinicos

6:00pm Internet Working Group meeting

7:00pm General Assembly

People wonder about what participants are saying and you can read to your heart’s content at OWS article sites like http://occupywallst.org/article/urgent-winter-donation-needs/. But pictures can be more compelling than long arguments, even when cogent. Early on OWS protesters were able to capture detailed and often graphic jarring images of police tactics and even spot violence in what seemed to concerted effort to intimidate citizens who were exercising 1^st Amendment rights. Streaming media could show the attempts to speak out for rights by way of what seemed reasonable peaceful and lawful public demonstrations. This was the case in late Sept. when some 60 - 70 armed police officers surrounded the park in which 200 to 300 peaceful Occupy Wall St. protesters were encamped.

You can see some of these videos on truthtransmission.com, but not much appeared on mainstream media at the time. Things have changed a bit with tear gassing and mass arrests on the Brooklyn Bridge and now the war-like scenes from Oakland.

Such images seem to have advanced the movement which is more popular than the earlier Tea Party movement. But now it seems that there are some efforts to darken the citizen’s eye view of events by removing electrical power, confiscation media etc. We’ll have to see how this struggle over rights to protest and be heard plays out. It’s an open question whether Occupy Wall Street media team will be able to sustain their operation without things like confiscated generators. But for now sites like Global Revolution still bring you live streaming video coverage from independent journalists on the ground at Occupy and other nonviolent protests around the world. And of course you can see images of Lady Liberty, whose generators at least are working fine.

P.S. Some online sites have collected interesting parcels of Lady Liberty related images.

Words, Things and Simplifying Explanations like Free Will

By Gary Berg-Cross

Language is a wonderful, adaptive, social tool. We use it to communicate to others, and thus it has evolved in part to serve social purposes. Putting a name to things helps bring some simplification to complex phenomena. But words can also be Procrustean beds that dice up real, roundish objects to fit into our square conceptual holes. For example, we can say that that a clock is happy or in pain, but to our best knowledge these are social rectifications of some concept that may not correspond to reality. They are borrowed from our social realm and used to explain things there. To some degree they reflect the fact we thinking and linguistically express things anthropomorphically as objects. We see and name the world in terms that make sense to us.Science is a discipline sitting on top of our social world with a specialized language. But the Sciences are also social so Scientists create causal hypothetical concepts such as the Ether or phlogiston to explain things.  If these fail to be validated by observation they come to be seen as artificial creations. 

Philosophy probably has had an equal number of word creations if not more. Among them are concepts like consciousness, self, spirit, will and free will. Is there a reality to them? Some like spirit, that have been pulled into religion and laden down with dogma, no longer seem viable as causal philosophical concepts. Others like consciousness seem fair game for a joint cognitive science-philosophy effort.

The Free-Will versus Determinism argument has been raging for quite a while and very now and then every now and then some thinker takes a whack at it. This usually stirs the pot anew. Philosophers with a good grounding in modern science have provided some new perspective on the topic using neuroscience and an evolutionary perspective. For example Daniel Dennett’s in his Consciousness Explained (1991) approached the issue something like an update to David Hume’s ideas in the light of our neo-synthesis of Darwin's theory of evolution. Dennett calls the idea that we live in the here and now, moving steadily into the future an illusion. Instead cognitive "real time" is a spider web process of zigzagging through memories as we assess our progress on goals, hopes, plans and regrets! Indeed,in his view the Self like Consciousness is a type of internal reification. It is a constructed web of tales spun by us to make sense of experience. To Dennett our human consciousness, along with our narrative self-hood, is a product of experience not their source. This makes sense for several reasons including the fact that as children are learning language they see others as objects and so it is easy to identify oneself as a similar object. This concept of a conscious self serves a role of a unified agent who we can speak about in simple words. During this period we may pick up a term like "soul" and make a simple connection to a concrete concept so that the term comes becomes part of an unverified system of belief.

More recently Dennett took on the issue of whether there can be freedom and free will in a deterministic world in his Freedom Evolves. Surprisingly he frames his conclusion in the other direction considering the idea that as cognitive agents we can avoid some things we foresee. Our ability to understand some things mitigates the idea of inevitability.  
"Some things we can avoid. We are free to avoid some things such as ducking to avoid a tree branch. Very useful, but it doesn’t work so easily with a Tsunami. So some parts of the future is inevitable and others not within a deterministic world. So some concept of freedom is not an illusion but an adaptive, objective phenomenon that is distinct from other biological conditions and found in only humans through evolution. We are less instinctual, automated creatures and can even chose to be non-adaptive to prove a point."

See http://dontdontoperate.wordpress.com/2011/05/29/free-will-religion-without-god-dennetts-compatibilism/ for Dilbert's view on Free Will.

Even more recently Sam Harris has had a go at the issue in his The Moral Landscape (pp. 102-110), which has further stirred the pot. To Harris, unlike Dennett, the problem with free will is that no account of causality leaves room for it. All our internal life of thoughts, moods, and emotions effect of us in ways that are: “from a subjective point of view, perfectly inscrutable.”

Harris asks why he might have used the term “inscrutable” in the above sentence and answers for us that he has no idea. It is not clear that he was free or constrained to do this and even the meaning of the claim is inscrutable or opaque. 

Harris’ stance mixes philosophy and cognitive-neuroscience observing that only a small fraction of momentary information that our brains process becomes conscious. This requires attention which we have in small amount. You can actually experience how limited this is in the selective attention video on YouTube. 

The essential message is that human evolution has given us a cognitive system that allows us to note only important changes in our environment. It has not produced an all knowing or even totally rational system. We use simplifying models to helps us make sense of a complex world. While we are aware of some our inner life of thoughts and emotions, we are personally unaware of the neural events that produce these changes. Thus we generate models of the world of ourselves and of other people explain why things happen. These such as concepts of a unified self are simplifications, but pretty good ones to start with. It’s just that Science has moved us along and is helping us un-muddle the words used for concepts that are not simple “things” but processes.

Perhaps somewhere between Dennett and Harris’ views is Schopenhauer's summary statement pushing the issue a bit farther back to cognitive primitives:

'Man can indeed do what he wants, but he cannot want what he wants'.

It seems to capture an important aspect of the argument.

Thank you, Paula Kirby!

Yesterday, Paula Kirby wrote an outstanding article in the Washington Post's On Faith column about religion and freedom. It was an excellent examination of the subject, and it drove the theists nuts in the comments.

Unfortunately, their defenses are about points not brought up by Paula to prove her case. None of them successfully refute her at all. Their objections run the gamut from cites of famous dictators such as Hitler and Stalin to pointing out the positive values that Christianity supposedly teaches. I guess I could say does teach, since the bible does say things such as you shouldn't steal or lie in court or murder people, but the problem isn't with a lack of positive values. Her point is that by adhering to the teachings of a deity, worshiping a deity, obeying its laws and dictates, one is submitting oneself to the dictatorial rule of an unseen, unheard entity whose human representatives are the ones that claim to have the real scoop on what that deity has to say!

Revolutionary thoughts

This past week has been an incredible time to watch the news. To see a wave of revolution begin to sweep across the Middle East is a rare peek into the process of humanity’s yearning for the better things in life, beginning with the very most basic freedoms a culture can ask for.

It has been a pleasure to see the Egyptian people take their lives, their fortunes and their national honor into their hands and demand redress of a repressive government, asking relief from a government that fails to protect its people from economic ruin caused by wealthy corporations, backs the torture of prisoners, jails opponents without trial and protects the wealthy elite from the vagaries of economic cycles, forcing the poor to live without a safety net… wait … hold on, something sounds familiar about that.

No, could it be? Is it possible?

Man, I’ve been wondering why the Republicans have been so silent about this wave of revolutions. Usually they are so quick to note the similarity between popular revolutions and our own, but this time they have been so quiet. Usually, they praise the courage and bravery of the protesters as they bring down an oppressive government, but strangely, this time, they have not.

Could it be they have noted that the characteristics of the Egyptian government are just a little too close to the new Republican values this time? Think about it. Protection of the wealthy, laws that favor the wealthy elite and their businesses, failure to protect the poor, if not outright exploitation of them. A failure of the Republicans to condemn torture and the unending, indefinite nature of the detainment of the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay without trial. Sound familiar? It should be, these are the hallmarks of many of the dictatorships in the Middle East, and finally, the Tunisians, the Egyptians, the Sudanese, the Syrians and others are beginning to bestir themselves to bring down these nasty men of little honor.

Please, don’t get me wrong. I am familiar with the requirements of realpolitic and the need of our government to secure our supply of life-giving oil. I know that in the past it has been necessary to be pals with some of the scum of the earth in order to feed our need for energy. Even today, in the midst of this new wave of uprisings, we still need to treat them with kid gloves, lest some of our current crop of scum dictators friends, get the idea that they might be next to get tossed under the bus.

Sometimes, yes, diplomacy means having to hold your nose when shaking hands.

If only politics at home weren’t beginning to have the same scent… er, flavor.

It is interesting that it is the middle east where people have finally woken up to the nasty nature of a political elite that favor the wealthy over everybody else, exploit the poor and deny human rights to opponents before the American people. We are so smug about our superior, modern progressive values that we have been blind to the conversion of an old trusted political party into something that Lincoln would never have recognized, much less accepted.

There was a time when the Republicans honored the values that made this country great. When they did not twist those values into something unrecognizable to the Founders they profess to worship so highly. But now, they not only twist those values, they twist history, intertwining lies with the truth in teaching our youth about the founding of this country, building the basic blocks of theocracy and oligarchic dictatorship while wrapping themselves in a flag that should stand for something else.

We live in dangerous times, when men like Rush Limbaugh can laugh at the attacks of an endangered dictator upon the free press - until reporters of his chosen network of propaganda become targets. When men like Glenn Beck can twist the current events in Egypt into a sinister plot to overthrow western civilization, and his audience not only does not turn him off, but listens, I begin to wonder about the applicability of the old Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting times”!

The now famous quote from Sinclair Lewis, 'When Fascism Comes to This Country, It Will Be Wrapped in the Flag Carrying a Cross', is as apropos as ever today, and should be taught in every classroom in the country - right after evolutionary biology and modern physics!

Think again about the protesters in Cairo and every other Egyptian city. They have lived with such a regime for the last fifty-eight years, from Nassar to Mubarak. Civilian puppets bobbing on the strings of a military dictatorship with oligarchic characteristics. Today, they have participated in a massive protest, one the military has tried to hide from view by a coordinated attack on the free press.

Is that the future of this country? Is that what you want your children or grandchildren to live under? Is it possible that the freedoms we have taken for granted could be so easily swept away that it could take a second American revolution to correct the situation?

I know, it sounds so alarmist, so… kooky. Kind of like flying saucers, you know?

But it could happen, and it will, unless the American people can begin to see the illogic of backing a party that professes to honor the principles of individual liberty while backing the use of the power of the State to push one specific religious viewpoint. A party that refuses to condemn torture or indefinite detainment and warrantless surveillance of the American public.

All tools of dictators. Totalitarian governments. Theocracies. Oligarchies.

Nasty words, aren’t they? Conjuring pictures of concentration camps, middle of the night arrests and summary executions.

What can we do? Can we do anything?

Of course we can. We can spread the truth.

Fight for science education in the schools. Fight against religious indoctrination in public schools and the diversion of public school funds into religious schools through innocuous sounding voucher programs.

Every time you hear someone say this country was founded as a Christian nation, set them straight. Loudly and vociferously.

Fight the current trend to post the ten commandments or say prayers at city or county council meetings.

Fight for progressive ideals that protect the poor and control and restrain the wealthy elite.

Above all, if you are part of the silently non-religious that keep quiet because of a fear of being exposed to the majority, SPEAK OUT and make yourself known! It is ONLY through banding together to oppose the use of religion to make this country into a religious oligarchy that we can protect our descendants from having to live under a regime that would curb our freedoms and turn this country into the kind of place that millions have come here to avoid!

Two hundred and thirty four years ago, our forefathers did what no people had ever done before - they fought a king for their freedom and won! It took them over eight long years, but finally, they prevailed.

This week, the Egyptians are fighting for their own freedom. I hope I can honor their sacrifices in actually paying attention to their actions.

So let us take their example, take the lessons of history to heart and do what the Republicans have twisted into their own message - let’s take our country back!