- Just shortly after the Boston Tea Party, riots, and a retaliatory blockade of Boston Harbor by the British, one of my colleagues in England commented, “With regard to the people of Boston, I am free to own that I neither approve of their riots nor their punishment.” And, he added, the violence being perpetrated is “the natural effect of such measures as ours (the British punishment inflicted upon the colonists) on the minds of freemen.”
- I stated, in one of my own writings, that “I am grieved to hear of mobs and violence...I am in perpetual anxiety lest the mad measure of mixing soldiers among a people whose minds are in such a state of irritation, may be attended with some sudden mischief; for an accidental quarrel, a personal insult, an imprudent order, an insolent execution of even a prudent one, or twenty other things may produce a tumult, unforeseen and therefore impossible to be prevented, in which such a carnage may ensue as to make a breach that can never afterwards be healed.”
- Regarding the unwillingness of the British regime to address the wrongs it had done to the American colonists, I wrote of my concern that “they (the British ministers hostile to our cause) rather wished to provoke the North American people into an open rebellion which might justify a military execution.”
These are quite sobering parallels, my friends — and as this movement perseveres and grows in the days ahead, we all need to be aware of the dangers of descending into anarchy, fueled by the uncaring Trump administration, seeking to further provoke and divide us. Those who ignore the lessons of history are doomed to repeat it.
Your humble servant,
B.Franklin