Letter: U.S was founded on individual liberties, not collective values

Mr. Beem’s article “The selfish minority” (May 8) is probably the most outrageous of his many outrageous articles. In addition to his customary Trump bashing, he has managed to castigate everyone of a conservative viewpoint.

He says he is only writing about a minority of people, but then says “Trump supporters are not really conservatives.” It is those Trump supporters who put him in office, all those who voted for him and gave him an electoral college win, and the presidency. Hardly a minority.

Amidst the bluster and bloviating, the following one sentence requires serious consideration: “And what the far right is unable or unwilling to understand is that the principles upon which this country was founded are not individual liberties but collective values.”

This country was founded on “individual liberties.”

Let me quote from “Decision in Philadelphia” by Christopher and James Collier: “Guaranteed rights, then, were exceedingly important to Americans through the 1770s and 1780s. They were, in essence, what the country had fought the Revolution for.”

“Guaranteed rights” are “individual” rights, and that’s why the Bill of Rights was added as the first 10 Amendments to the U.S. Constitution in 1791, a scant 3½    years after the ratification of the U.S. Constitution itself.

Mr. Beem reminds me of the outrageous character, Phineas T. Bluster, of the Howdy Doody TV show of the 1940s.

I would suggest Mr. Beem spend less time blustering, and more time reading up on U.S. history, and he could start with the Colliers’ book, subitled “The Constitutional Convention of 1787.”

Bob Casimiro
Bridgton

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