a rallying cry.........................

 A dismissive Henry Clay once described the Democratic Party to a small group of Louisville notables as "the Jackson party . . . a mere personal party."  And certainly as the 1832 presidential election approached, the coalition, entering only its second national contest, lacked Jackson's prestige and popularity.  What is more, the president seemed to will even his unfolding opposition into existence.  The National Republicans attacked the Indian Removal Act and Bank veto while stressing the emanating danger of executive usurpation, thus making Jackon himself the main campaign issue.  Certainly no single individual did more to provide a rallying cry for enemies and allies alike during this pregnant period of partisan formation.

-David S. Brown, The First Populist: The Defiant Life of Andrew Jackson

Yep..........................

 People love familiarity. That’s true not just for faces but products, careers, and styles. It’s almost like nature’s risk-management system.

-Morgan Housel, cut-and-pasted from here

The year was 1901............................

     Roosevelt could see little relief for the rural unemployed in the immediate future.  A place like York,  Pennsylvania . . . was the typical country town grown too big.  There were more than a thousand such cities across the nation.  For its new poor, York offered only more poverty.  A laborer might trade his hoe for a hammer, but a few extra dollars a week, the increment was meaningless, given urban costs.  His children would still run barefoot through November, and in midwinter their breath would be ice on their bedsheets.  Even more wretched than these migrants were the immigrants from unsalubrious parts of Europe further crowding American cities.  Since January, nearly have a million had poured in.  With their greasy kerchiefs and swollen cheekbones, they seemed content to live in any slum and do any work, for pig's wages.  Not surprisingly, the native-born Americans they had supplanted felt rage and ethnic contempt.  Roosevelt's journalist friend William Allen White spoke for many in his syndicated diatribes against "Hunkies and Italians, the very scum of European civilization."

-Edmund Morris,  Theodore Rex

This all seems very familiar..............

 
       As he did so often, the president wrapped himself in his country's flag.  Patriotism dripped from his words.  But he added a new element to the American story:  the idea that the nation was venturing into the world not for conquest or exploitation but to lift up less civilized people and foster productive and healthy nations where none before had existed.  There was a certain patronizing tone in these passages, even a condescension.  Perhaps it was inevitable in a world dominated by Western power, technology, mobility, and wealth, and when most other regions untended by Western colonialism seemed backward and helpless by comparison.  And the president's particular brand of idealistic expansionism certainly lent itself to allegations of hypocrisy, given the exploitation that inevitably accompanied most colonial enterprises, as Senator Hoar had noted.  Indeed the anti-imperialists savaged the speech, none more vociferously than Godkin in The Nation.  "There was not a spark of initiative or leadership in it," said the magazine, portraying McKinley as "one of those rare public speakers who are able to take a good deal of humbug in such a way as to make their average hearers think it excellent sense and exactly their idea."
     Perhaps Godkin's underlying complaint was that public sentiment coincided largely with the president's vision and not the anti-expansionist thinking of his magazine.  It was clear, in any event, that the Boston speech gave much of the country precisely what it wanted:  an agreeable rationale fro America's bold new venture into the world.  The anti-imperialists would continue their agitations, but the country's majority sentiment favored the expansionist urge—so long as it was executed smoothly and at an acceptable cost.

-Robert W. Merry,  President McKinley:  Architect of the American Century

This sounds..............................

...................................................................very familiar.

Every religion's problem.......?

     "Even during the Buddha's lifetime, there were people such as the monk Arittha, who misunderstood the Buddha's teachings and conveyed them incorrectly.  It is also apparent that some of the monks who memorized the sutras over the centuries did not understand their deepest meanings, or at the very least, they forgot or changed some words.  As a result, some of the Buddha's teachings were distorted even before they were written down." 

A solution?

     "Often, we need to study several discourses and compare them in order to understand which is the true teaching of the Buddha.  It is like stringing precious jewels together to make a necklace.  If we see each sutra in light of the overall body of teaching, we will not be attached to any one teaching."

-both excerpts from Thich Nhat Hanh,  The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching:  Transforming Suffering into Peace, Joy, and Liberation