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Commoner Sense: The Working Person’S Guide to America
Commoner Sense: The Working Person’S Guide to America
Commoner Sense: The Working Person’S Guide to America
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Commoner Sense: The Working Person’S Guide to America

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In "Commoner Sense", author Patrick J. Fornari, a no-nonsense average American working person, examines the United States unique past, present, and possible future. Built on more than a decade of research condensed into an overview of the working persons role in America, Fornaris perspective lends credibility, importance, and a clear voice to the diminishing role of the American voter and worker in American politics. Commoner Sense addresses a variety of topics including slavery and racism, religious freedom, liberal utopian sensibility, American exceptionalism, the IRS, the economy, and Obamacare. It presents the ideas of our founding fathers, shows how those ideas are playing out in todays America, looks toward the future, and encourages each American to regain control of the countrys destiny, which has been hijacked by an elite ruling class. Fornaris everyman life experience represents the much-neglected commonsense view of the government and country by Americas working class. He details how life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness isnt just for the history books anymore; its for the present and the future.

LanguageEnglish
PublisheriUniverse
Release dateMar 6, 2014
ISBN9781491722749
Commoner Sense: The Working Person’S Guide to America
Author

Patrick J. Fornari

Patrick J. Fornari has worked a variety of jobs in America, including the first half of his over thirty-five year construction career, pursuing the second half on several Caribbean Islands. Fornari plans to return to America in the near future. This is his debut book.

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    Commoner Sense - Patrick J. Fornari

    COMMONER SENSE

    THE WORKING PERSON’S GUIDE TO AMERICA

    Copyright © 2014 Patrick J. Fornari.

    All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

    iUniverse books may be ordered through booksellers or by contacting:

    iUniverse

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    Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

    Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

    Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

    ISBN: 978-1-4917-2273-2 (sc)

    ISBN: 978-1-4917-2274-9 (e)

    Library of Congress Control Number: 2014901372

    iUniverse rev. date: 03/04/2014

    For my father

    CONTENTS

    Introduction

       1   In the Beginning

       2   All Men Are Created Equal?

       3   The Triple Threat

       4   The New World(s)?

       5   The Elites

       6   The Progress of the Progressives

       7   So, You Say You Want a Revolution?

       8   Over There

       9   Over Here

       10   Separation of What and What?

       11   Who’s Runnin’ This Show Anyhow?

       12   The Streets Are Paved with Gold!

       13   The Fix Is In

       14   Think Like an American

       15   Who Are You?

       16   Truth or Consequences?

       17   Who Can You Trust Now?

       18   I’m Just One Person

       19   The Death of the Happy Warrior

       20   Say What?

       21   In the End, We Are at the Beginning

       22   Left Lane or Right Lane?

       23   The Unwritten Chapter

    Afterword

    About the Author

    Bibliography

    INTRODUCTION

    In the following pages I offer a condensed version of what I have gleaned from my life experience and the one-hundred-plus books I have read over the last decade about our country. I am not a college guy, writer, historian, philosopher, or politician. I’m a working person. I’m you. I am a carpenter by trade and amateur stonemason. My beliefs, though influenced by traditional American political philosophy, are neither Republican nor Democrat. My intention is to express my opinion and interpretation of the founding and history of America. Helping to shape my opinion is the fact that I have lived outside of America the better part of the last eighteen years. This has afforded me a unique perspective that many Americans may not have experienced. I love America and hope to return to it in the not-too-distant future.

    In addition, I want to take this opportunity to acknowledge my enormous respect, unending gratitude, and deep appreciation for the unbelievably talented, educated, and long-established writers who have collectively inspired me to write this book. These writers’ dedication, unparalleled research, and just plain hard work are a testament to the greatness of our country and the freedom to exercise our rights as Americans. As a working person, you understandably may not have had the time or energy to pursue our history in the manner that I have. The main subjects that have captured my interest include American history, philosophy, religion, science, political opinion, and biographies of our founders. You no doubt will notice that, while commenting on contemporary politics, I avoid naming current politicians in that doing so does not serve the purpose of this book, which is to help inform you, the average working person, about the past, present, and possible future of our country.

    CHAPTER ONE

    In the Beginning

    November 22, 1963

    I was a five-year-old boy watching Bozo’s Circus , as I imagine just about all five-year-olds in northwest Indiana and the greater Chicago area were. A newsman came on the TV and said, The president has been shot. I ran into the kitchen and literally tugged on my mother’s apron strings as she stirred a large pot on the stove. I exclaimed the news.

    Oh no, honey. The president is fine was my mother’s response. Okay, she was my mom, I was only five years old, and maybe I had this wrong. I knew exactly who the president was; he was the first Catholic president, and he was an Irish American. He was the constant topic of my Irish Italian American, Catholic, largely Democrat family. I returned to the little black-and-white TV. The man said the president was dead. I ran back into the kitchen. I don’t remember anything after that except my mother was sitting on the couch, crying almost uncontrollably into her apron and a dish towel. It wasn’t until much later in life that I realized that my wonderful Irish American, Catholic mother could not even begin to process what her five-year-old son had said to her on that November day. Nor were millions of other Americans able to process it. The truly unthinkable had happened; we were in for a turbulent decade.

    The seeds of the imminent clash between the counterculture and the establishment were beginning to germinate. The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and the Vietnam War were on their way in, and the 1950s family was on its way out. Five years after JFK, Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy would also fall to assassins’ bullets just months apart. Now ten years old, I asked myself, What is happening? Is this politics in America? Truthfully, it scared the hell out of me. I thought the United States was different. I wondered if we would survive it. Five years after King and Robert Kennedy, it was Nixon and Watergate. It did, indeed, turn out to be a rough ten years, bookended by the assassination of a beloved Democrat president and the resignation of Richard Nixon in 1974, a feared and loathed Republican president. Now, at sixteen years old, the combination of these huge events really made me wonder what the heck was going on. As the years unfolded, I learned America was different, and that we would survive. Many countries might have spiraled out of control into civil unrest and revolution for years, even decades, under the compounding weight of these enormous national tragedies. The iconic decade simply known as the sixties left its mark well beyond its numerical designation. How were we different? Why were we able to survive the 1960s, let alone the 1860s?

    If you were like me when you were growing up in your middle-class neighborhood, you sensed a certain order to things. In fact, you were witness to more stability and predictability afforded to more people than in all of human history: the American middle class. It didn’t matter much, in a rigid class sense at least, which end of the middle-class spectrum you occupied. I knew rich kids, and it was clear to me I wasn’t one of them. The kids in my neighborhood were terrible, myself chief among them. We were harsh and cynical beyond our years in relation to what our circumstances might demand, and spoiled in ways previously not experienced by the masses. We also enjoyed abundant food, freedom, and unlimited potential. As a child, my immediate needs were met. I was rich enough.

    No doubt as you grew up in your neighborhood, you were exposed to the same ceaseless mantra of your older siblings and friends that I had drilled into my head almost daily. Specifically, Hey, that’s not fair! as well as the timeless classic, Hey, it’s a free country and I can say what I want to! What gems! You latched onto these well-worn terms immediately. They made sense, serving to identify you as an individual among what seemed like a thousand other kids who surrounded you. You were empowered, you mattered, and these were your rights!

    I wonder how many children of centuries past were aware of such monumental concepts. Not many, I suspect. Little did you know that these simple childhood declarations were actually the historic and enlightened foundational cornerstones of your country and the guarantee of the freedom you enjoyed daily as an American citizen. It felt quite natural, organic to your existence as an American. Now, as then, it is part of your makeup, your American DNA.

    As I grew older, I embellished these indispensable phrases with choice expletives lending the weight to them that they deserved. The demographics of my neighborhood demanded such profanity if you were to be taken seriously. I consider this practice a lost art. If you swear all the time, you negate the emphasis it can afford you. Akin to the notion that If everything is an emergency, then nothing is an emergency. I worked construction with a guy who could fit eight F-bombs into a six-word sentence. I never figured out what he was talking about. My point is, language matters. Our founders were acutely aware of this fact.

    How did you end up in this American middle-class world? In part, it was due to language. The more educated among the founders spoke multiple languages, some mastering Greek and Latin, enabling them to access history’s most profound text. Our founders brought these disciplines, as well as a comprehensive knowledge of history, philosophy, mechanics, science, art, religion, and politics, to the drafting of our founding documents. It would have been difficult to find a more competent collection of individuals to execute the self-appointed task of creating no less than a new type of existence for humankind.

    Now did these enlightened souls set out to purposely do this? Well, not exactly—not at first, anyhow. Many of our founders were men of wealth, property, and social status, but not all. Some had origins as farmers, tradesmen, physicians, or clergymen. In previous centuries, the elite ruling class likely would have excluded people of working-class roots in the formation of their own government. The working person probably wouldn’t have been considered in government documents except to make certain the limits on their freedom and rights.

    The New World did present opportunities and a chance to improve your lot in life. However, many of the old-world traditions, laws, taxes, and government institutions were firmly in place throughout the colonies. Ultimately, the king of England, the monarchy, ruled the colonists. Resisting the Crown’s rule caused a number of our founders to lose everything: their families, their fortunes, and even their own lives.

    The sovereign-over-the-commoner, the king-over-the-subject, paradigm was the way of the world in one form or another for thousands of years. Our Declaration of Independence, our Constitution, and our Bill of Rights collectively are the marker thrown down onto the timeline of world history that underpins the concept of American Exceptionalism. The idea of an American president standing on foreign shores and marginalizing the fact of American Exceptionalism in an apologetic tone as nothing more than some kind of a nationalist, arrogant sentiment is appalling! American Exceptionalism is not a debatable point; it just is, like gravity. It is not transferable or applicable to other countries or cultures.

    Our historically literate founders knew well which proven ideas to steal from the past, applying them to their present and to our future. These were among the most honorable of thefts in history. They also knew what to reject, leaving failed ideas to fade away without consideration. Many of today’s politicians carry on incessantly about our great democracy. We are not a democracy. We are a representative, constitutional republic with democratic characteristics. Many of these

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