This Is Why I Hung My Flag Upside Down

New neighbor knocked on my door this week City of just bought a house in the neighborhood and had returned from deployment and asked that I take down my American flag that was hanging upside down. I asked him what did he think it “surrender” he said. I said no! It was a sign of distress our country was in trouble with Trump as our president we are losing our democracy and Constitution. President Trump has embolden hate groups, white supremacy and racism

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” ― Edmund Burke

That’s the short version, attributed to Burke. A longer version reads as follows:

Whilst men are linked together, they easily and speedily communicate the alarm of any evil design. They are enabled to fathom it with common counsel, and to oppose it with united strength. Whereas, when they lie dispersed, without concert, order, or discipline, communication is uncertain, counsel difficult, and resistance impracticable. Where men are not acquainted with each other’s principles, nor experienced in each other’s talents, nor at all practised in their mutual habitudes and dispositions by joint efforts in business; no personal confidence, no friendship, no common interest, subsisting among them; it is evidently impossible that they can act a public part with uniformity, perseverance, or efficacy. In a connection, the most inconsiderable man, by adding to the weight of the whole, has his value, and his use; out of it, the greatest talents are wholly unserviceable to the public. No man, who is not inflamed by vain-glory into enthusiasm, can flatter himself that his single, unsupported, desultory, unsystematic endeavours, are of power to defeat the subtle designs and united cabals of ambitious citizens. When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.

–Edmund Burke, Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents 82-83 (1770) in: Select Works of Edmund Burke, vol. 1, p. 146 (Liberty Fund ed. 1999).

It’s as true today as it was 200 years ago–except for now, in modern times, the sin of giving into political apathy would be extended to women too. Edmund Burke‘s writings, which laid the intellectual foundations for modern conservatism (a cautious kind of conservatism, to be precise), can be found in our collections of Free eBooks and Free Audio Books. You can also download his major work, Reflections on the Revolution in France, through Audible’s Free Trial program.