Common Sense and Reason Again

John Bassett McCleary

• Publisher: Slow Limbo Publishing
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780966868753
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Communism, Post-Communism & Socialism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

COMMON SENSE AND REASON AGAIN: The continued existence of every man, woman, child and family pet balances on what I am writing here and how it is received. In this book my audience is literally everybody in America and accordingly. the whole world.

Many of the things I discuss in this book have never been heard of before, and most of the other issues herein are still unsolved today, even though they have been explored, explained and in essence solved by hundreds of the most brilliant people throughout the ages.

Cocky, greedy, arrogant, hotdoggers are all heading for a painful fall. Your ego lifts you higher and higher, and then one day your are bested in some way, and you discover you are only just normal. But normal is very good! You can become anything you want as a normal person; just use the common sense that is all round you and in most every person. Do the right things, be helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, and not greedy, bigoted or selfish. Change yourself before your social sins come back to haunt you. By the way, sex is not a sin. Killing, stealing (greed) and bearing false witness (lying) are mortal sins.

Idolizing someone because they are rich, rebellious or powerful is a mistake on numerous levels. Often, rich people are not rich because they are doing something right, but because they are doing something wrong. Rebellious people are often rebelling against society's restrictions, which have been put in place to protect everybody, including them. And many powerful people are egocentric, slightly clinically insane, or consumed with power. Everybody considers themselves to be the center of the universe, but only the arrogant make a big deal out of it.

A small number of people are creating all of the problems in this world, and the solution is for all the rest of us to take a 180-degree turn and say to them, "I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!"

COMMON SENSE AND REASON AGAIN

“John Bassett McCleary follows a long-time family characteristic of upending the status quo. His grandfather, James Madison Bassett, was the driving force in exposing the corporate fraud of one of the “Big Four” railroad barons, Collis P. Huntington. And John’s father, W. K. Bassett, initiated the field workers union in Hawaii,providing protection and benefits for the laborers against the fruit canning company owners. John has led the effort of multiple generations to question authority and persons in power.

“McCleary’s writings continue a journalistic tradition, for he is the heir to a family of penmen titans—owners, publishers, editors, reporters for the publications The Golden Era, Oakland Tribune, Los Angeles Herald, Oakland Enquirer, San Francisco Chronicle, Pacific Commercial Advertiser, the Honolulu Times, Boston Herald, Providence Bulletin, the magazine Controversy, Pacific Weekly and the Carmel Cymbal.”

Douglas Schmitz

Author, historian, Bassett family biographer

COMMON SENSE and REASON AGAIN

Comments On The Flaws of Our

Government and Society in General

With Concise Remarks on

Capitalism and Religion

written by

John Bassett McCleary

edited by

Joan Jeffers McCleary

Slow Limbo Publishing

ISBN: 0-9668687-3-9

Copyright © 2020 John Bassett McCleary

Copyright © 2003/2019 John Bassett McCleary

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, except brief excerpts for the purpose of review, without written permission of the author and publisher.

Other books by John Bassett McCleary

The People’s Book

Celestial Arts, 1972

Monterey Peninsula People

ISBN 0-9668687-0-6

Slow Limbo Productions, 1998

The Hippie Dictionary

ISBN 1-58008-355-2

Ten Speed Press, Crown Press/Random House, 2002 revised 2004

Mother’s Heart, Father’s Mind

ISBN 0-9668687-4-6

For more information about this book or John McCleary’s other works, please see: hippiedictionary.com or commonsenseagain.net

Common Sense and Reason Again is the second book in The Hippie Trilogy:

The Hippie Dictionary

Common Sense and Reason Again

Mother’s Heart, Father’s Mind

Dedicated To

The people who have spoken out unheard.

Those who are afraid to speak out.

And to

John and Richard Miller, who spoke out all their lives
and demanded to be heard;

you know which Millers you are among all the Millers!

With guidance from Thomas Paine

Introduction—Thomas Paine

Common Sense [1776]

“In the following pages I offer nothing more than simple facts, plain arguments, and common sense; and have no other preliminaries to settle with the reader, than that he will divest himself of prejudice and prepossession, and suffer his reason and his feelings to determine for themselves; that he will put on, or rather that he will not put off the true character of a man, and generously enlarge his views beyond the present day.”

Introduction

Perhaps the sentiments contained in the following pages, are not yet sufficiently fashionable to procure them general favor; a long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom. But tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason.

As a long and violent abuse of power is generally the means of calling the right of it in question, (and in matters too which might never have been thought of, had not the sufferers been aggravated into the inquiry,) and as the king of England hath undertaken in his own right, to support the parliament in what he calls theirs, and as the good people of this country are grievously oppressed by the combination, they have an undoubted privilege to inquire into the pretensions of both, and equally to reject the usurpations of either.

In the following sheets, the author hath studiously avoided every thing which is personal among ourselves. Compliments as well as censure to individuals make no part thereof. The wise and the worthy need not the triumph of a pamphlet; and those whose sentiments are injudicious or unfriendly, will cease of themselves, unless too much pains is bestowed upon their conversion.

The cause of America is, in a great measure, the cause of all mankind. Many circumstances have, and will arise, which are not local, but universal, and through which the principles of all lovers of mankind are affected, and in the event of which, their affections are interested. The laying a country desolate with fire and sword, declaring war against the natural rights of all mankind, and extirpating the defenders thereof from the face of the earth, is the concern of every man to whom nature hath given the power of feeling; of which class, regardless of party censure, is the …

Author [Thomas Paine}

Philadelphia, Feb. 14, 1776.

Introduction—John McCleary

Common Sense and Reason Again [2020]

There are immoral minorities, but no immoral majorities. Most people are moral and that is why democracy is the best form of government. In order to save our world, we must, at times, be disturbingly frank, painfully truthful.

I want to focus on the male ego, greed and insecurity. These are the reasons for most of the world’s problems.

Our world can be a family, a tribe, town, state or country and then our planet. And our family, tribe, town, state, country and world are not, personally, ours alone. There are other family members and other occupants of “our” world. We are all just in these groups and places for a while with others. Your country is other peoples’ world, other peoples’ family. If you think you are the center of the universe, you are not alone; everyone thinks they are the center of everything. It is only the greedy and arrogant who make a big deal out of it. In order to be a good family member, you must respect the other “family” members in our world.

Patriotism, nationalism and ethnic pride are important to give us a foundation in our history, but global democracy exists to prepare for and insure for our good future. If you have no living family, children or spouse, you might, I say, might, have a justification for not caring about our environment, peace and freedom, after you die, but I am sure you will not be going to heaven, nirvana or Club Med wherever you think death should take you.

Don’t confuse the difference between a revolutionary war and a war of economics and expansion. Don’t confuse the difference between a weapon of defense and a weapon...