This week’s Tune for Tuesday, “Molasses to Rum” from 1776, was selected for a variety of reasons. As a holiday meant to celebrate the creation of a “free” nation approaches, too many have forgotten or choose to ignore that when the Declaration of Independence was being drafted, while the group who signed it did have many brilliant men among its members, the group as a whole consisted entirely of extremely flawed human beings and hypocrites. They knew this was sort of thing was wrong, even then, but either only cared about or chose to focus on the profits, making each and every one of them complicit. It makes me all the more inclined to believe that these hypocritical men really did regularly consult members of the Iroquois Confederacy instead of doing it entirely on their own.
Another reason is that in the country I unfortunately reside in, so few politicians have the stomach to not only stand up to the tyrants in charge, but to speak up at all in defense of the common citizens they’ve sworn to aide. Nearly 250 years have passed since the Declaration of Independence, but like in the song itself, when the unsavory truth is being shouted at the top of one’s lungs for all to hear, can these cocky politicians do anything more than desperately yet meekly plead for silence, regardless of what they claim to be their political leaning?
