Is Benjamin Franklin relevant to today
With all the controversy that besets our republic today, it might be good to have a look at the words of one of our founding fathers, a man whose image is on our currency even though he never was a president of the United States. An imaginative, intense, and intellectual man, he is one of the best known and loved American icons.
Back in the day, when I was a student at Hayward High School, I read The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin as one of the many books I checked out of the school library, a modern variation of one of his conceptions, the public library. I sucked down his words as a mental vacuum cleaner and his notions became a subconscious template for how I lived through my adulthood.
Looking at the book today, I can look at it from a baby boomer's eyes and experience. Franklin etched his feather pen to parchment. and wrote a treatise which is an excellent study in human nature.
Franklin was imaginative. intense, and intellectual, a combination that I've discovered threatens many people. Having begun his book before the American Revolution, he had no idea that he would become a historical icon. He thus wrote this tome in order to put his thoughts down on the record, and control how other people saw him.
The people he chose to illustrate were tragic foils who saw Franklin as someone to use. He didn't seem to have great people skills, so he tried to buy friends when he was younger because as a bookworm he sucked down the writings of others and his contemporaries found him unapproachable. Today Franklin would be described as a nerd.
What his book does not show is the abuse his foils heaped on Franklin. The pain he lived through is evident in the illustrations he chose to highlight, and without bragging, he penned a picture of a man that overcame the evil he encountered in society.
We as readers in the 21st century have a man who faced down that evil and accomplished what he needed to do. His is an inspirational tale, a basic human study that people today can use.