Day82 Friday 11/19/10

ran 2.7 miles

• Florida was the twenty-seventh state to join the union on March 3, 1845, nine months before Texas and eight years after Michigan.

• Population, as of 2009, is 18,537,969.

• Senators are Bill Nelson (D) and George S. LeMieux (R). Senator LeMieux did not run for reelection and Marco Rubio (R) will fill the seat once he is sworn in.

• Representatives are Jeff Miller (R), Allen Boyd (D), Corrine Brown (D), Ander Crenshaw (R), Virginia Brown-Waite (R), Clifford Stearns (R), John Mica (R), Alan Grayson (D), Gus Bilirakis (R), Bill Young (R), Kathy Castor (D), Adam Putnam (R), Vern Buchanan (R), Connie Mack (R), Bill Posey (R), Thomas Rooney (R), Kendrick Meek (D), Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R), Ted Deutch (D), Debbie Wasserman-Schultz (D), Lincoln Diaz-Balart (R), Ron Klein (D), Alcee Hastings (D), Suzanne Kosmas (D), and Mario Diaz-Balart (R).

• Florida has twenty-seven electoral votes. Historically, the state has voted almost exclusively for Democrats from the Reconstruction period through the mid-twentieth century before becoming a primarily Republican state in 1952. A Democratic presidential candidate won the vote only in 1976, 1996 and 2008. Florida’s population has exploded in the last sixty years. During World War II, the state had only eight electoral votes and now they have twenty-seven, fourth most in the country. Florida has an extremely diverse population, virtually making it a microcosm of the entire United States, and is arguably the ultimate swing state.

Stepping away from facts about the state of Florida and moving on to a completely different topic, I was recently looking through a book I had read a couple years ago, Thomas More’s “Utopia”, first published in 1516, and thought it would be worth recommending. Pertaining to yesterday’s post, I had suggested that freedom and success in America were not so contingent on government as many people seem to believe. Weakness and reliance on government are what lube the gears of their machine.

In “Utopia”, More creates a civilization, which is obviously quite perfect as the name of the book suggests, but what makes it interesting is the fact that he wrote it in the sixteenth century, preceding Karl Marx and his communist ideas in the nineteenth century. “Utopia” is an interpretation of what life could be as viewed through a polished lens of concentrated common sense. But what makes it so interesting is that we naturally cannot escape our own human tendencies, such as greed, corruption, lust and war, among many other weaknesses that define our existence. This book forces you to question everything you think you know about the apparent rational world we live in.

While More was portraying a utopian existence, in which everything was perfect and completely unrealistic, almost in the form of a parody, Karl Marx, three hundred years later, transformed More’s comedy into a serious reality, which has been a cause for war and a source of oppression since “The Communist Manifesto” was printed in 1848.

In an attempt to make a point in comparing these two books, I look at More’s “Utopia” as liberal ideas that serve a great purpose as wishful, wistful hope in terms of “What if…”, but they deny the human element of being fallible and unpredictable. To take it a step further, I view Barack Obama as “The Communist Manifesto” naively attempting to make a reality of these unrealistic tenets. His ideas reek of socialism and our country has sacrificed tens of thousands of lives fighting the spread of socialist governments and policies for decades.

This is an excerpt from Thomas More’s introduction to “Utopia”, which sounds absolutely wonderful and fair but is completely unrealistic in the world we live in. It reminds me of Barack Obama’s campaign trail to the presidency, in which he promised completely unrealistic results that he is now paying a price for as he is unable to deliver the farfetched, farcical products he promoted.

“There is no house which does not have a door opening on the street and a back door into the garden;
Or the selection of candidates for ruler,
For each of the four quarters of the city names one person and proposes him to the senate;
Or the universal work at farming,
Farming is the one occupation in which all of them are skilled, men and women alike;
Or the color of their cloaks,
Throughout the island they are all of the same color, that of the natural wool;
Or the shifting of people to maintain uniform populations,
This limit is easily maintained by transferring persons from households with too many people to those with too few;
Or the distribution of goods,
And when it is distributed equitably to everyone, it follows that no one can be reduced to poverty or forced to beg;
Or the lack of seeking for offices,
Anyone who campaigns for public office becomes disqualified from holding any office at all;
Or their exclusion of lawyers,
They ban absolutely all lawyers as clever practitioners and sly interpreters of the law;
Or the recruitment of soldiers,
In each city they choose troops from a list of volunteers;
Or their strict keeping of a truce,
When they make a truce with their enemies, they keep it so religiously that they do not violate it even under provocation;
Or their withholding of honor and office from those who do not believe in the immortality of the soul, divine providence, and future rewards and punishment,
They bestow no honors on such a person, they assign him to no office, they put him in charge of no public responsibility…”

1,858.1 miles to go.