"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance."

"The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it always to be kept alive."

Dear Mr. Jefferson: What would you have to say were you to suddenly find yourself in the 21st century United States of America? Would you believe your ears? Your eyes? Mr. Jefferson, our current president is an individual of the servile privileged class (those who get rich by patronage rather than ingenuity), who managed to turn a life of indulgence, failure and superficiality into a disputed claim to the highest elective office in the land, twice no less.

"Experience hath shown, that even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny."

What would you make of a president who espouses a doctrine of preemptive war, who places our nation squarely on the path of fiscal insolvency, who doles out billions of dollars from the peoples' treasury into the hands of cronies and criminals, whose noblest expression is a sneer, whose tongue darts quickly out from between pursed lips when he lies, which is often?

"An honest man can feel no pleasure in the exercise of power over his fellow citizens."

Could you imagine your nation in the hands of one so petulant, so brazenly incapable of admitting wrong, a man so shallow that he seems to grieve for not a single one of the thousands dead at his own hand, a man with the audacity to claim guidance - if not governance - by the hand of God? A man who must surround himself with no one but sycophants, lest he waver in the faith of his own assuredness?

"Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends [life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness] it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government..."

"It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape."

What would you say, Mr. Jefferson, about an allegedly elected government that governs with imperial disdain for the constitution, that revolutionary document that you loved so dearly, who casts such a veil of secrecy over its conduct and pursuit of the "peoples' business" that some would say our nation has never been so cast into darkness? A government that spies on its own citizens, that takes prisoners against the rule of law and tortures them in prisons outside its own borders?

"A Bill of Rights is what the people are entitled to against every government, and what no just government should refuse, or rest on inference."

"If there is one principle more deeply rooted in the mind of every American, it is that we should have nothing to do with conquest."

"I hope our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us, that the less we use our power the greater it will be."

Can you imagine, Mr. Jefferson, your nation spending more on its defense than all of the other nations on earth combined? Can you conceive of the politicization of our military so that it becomes the instrument of a unitary chief executive held in sway by a hegemonic philosophy of global supremacy? Can you even remotely imagine your nation debased around the globe for its policies of injustice and empire? We have become a conquerer nation on borrowed funds.

"We must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt."

"I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country. "

And your nation? Corpulent consumers of crap from China we have become, for our nation manufactures next to nothing. We are the maw of the world, with an insatiable appetite for distraction and adulation of celebrity (especially when the fall from grace). I know how much you valued books, Mr. Jefferson, and we have largely become a nation of non-readers. Our newspapers, along with the airwaves, are controlled by fewer and fewer interests. More and more, the sources of our information are the same corporations that want to sell us so many things we neither need nor really want, but they have perfected the art and act of selling such that appetites are created with sublime finesse.

"All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent."

Could you ever have dreamed, Mr. Jefferson, that propaganda would be proffered as truth in your country, and moreover, that so much of the populace would willingly accept it as so? That the nation would idly watch the national treasury looted for the gain of a few?

"Our country is now taking so steady a course as to show by what road it will pass to destruction, to wit: by consolidation of power first, and then corruption, its necessary consequence."