Recently disingenuous right wingers have been quote mining a speech by the US President. A prime example is a guy from the National Citizens Coalition called Stephen Taylor. (The NCC is a wingnut welfare organisation that employs “ideologically sound” folk who can’t get work elsewhere. One of their last stars was the never gainfully employed Stephen Harper.)
Mr Taylor took one line from a speech and held it up as the point of the speech. The post remains even though he has been informed as to it’s selectively filled content.
But I didn’t mind the line he quote mined. I happen to know it’s true as he presented it.
“If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”
I have a business and I know I didn’t make it happen. We made it happen. I’m not afraid to say it, “It wasn’t me all on my lonesome it was everyone who has come before me and those who are around me as well as me.”
From the system of laws and politics I live under, to the roads I drive on and the dump I dispose of my waste in; it was not me, it was us and those before us.
Newton said,
If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.
But I like it’s predecessor better,
“We are like dwarfs sitting on the shoulders of giants. We see more, and things that are more distant, than they did, not because our sight is superior or because we are taller than they, but because they raise us up, and by their great stature add to ours.”
To say otherwise is demonstrate one’s stupidity.
