It’s time for a second American Revolution. Wait.
Let me correct that. It’s past
time. If the Founding Fathers were alive
today, we would already be either in a second revolution or it would have been
over.
Why do I say this?
We need to look first at what they said at the time of the
first one, beginning with the Declaration of Independence.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident:That all men
are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain
unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness; that,
to secure
these rights, governments are instituted among men,
deriving
their just powers from the consent of the governed;
that
whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends,
it is the
right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government,
laying its foundation on such principles, and
organizing
its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their
safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed,
will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light
and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that
mankind are
more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by
abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.
But when a
long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object,
evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism,
it is their
right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new
guards for their future security.
Such has been
the patient sufferance of these colonies; and such is now the necessity which
constrains them to alter their former systems of government. The history of the
present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and
usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute
tyranny over these states. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid
world.”
The Founders
said that we have rights as human beings given to us by God which include life,
liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Government
exists to see that we have and enjoy these rights, and governments derive their
power from the consent of the people.
When
government works against those purposes, the people have a right, even a duty,
to alter or abolish it.
But
wait. Isn’t this what elections are for?
The election
process has become so corrupt in our country as to often dilute if not thwart
the will of the people:
1) First, representative districts have
become so gerrymandered that there are few choices for many political offices
(most, in my state) and the same people who stay in office become less
responsive to the needs and wants of the people as they rely more on certain
people to help them stay in office.
2) The number of illegal immigrants is so
high that their numbers inflate population numbers to skew the number of
representatives a state is legally allowed to have, shifting political power to
states more likely to favor a role of government that is more actively involved
in the lives of its people, in a word, socialism. This is contrary to our Founders’ vision of
liberty and pursuit of happiness, because it involves the government
controlling more of your labor and wealth to use as it sees fit rather than you
doing that yourself.
This also gives a state more
electoral votes than it should have in Presidential elections.
3) Political parties, while an early
feature in American history, greatly limit the choices for political office and
essentially block any person not in those parties from being elected. Having a third person in most elections
allows a person to win an election with less than a majority of the vote,
usually giving the election to the candidate of the other major political party
who should not have won.
4) Our government has created so much
government dependency that it is impossible for people to vote to end it when
they are the recipients.
5) We have lost our moral compass so that
parties will do whatever is necessary to win an election. The city I grew up in had (has) a motto: Vote
early and vote often. Many states and
cities are so welcoming to illegal immigrants and so resistant to means of
safeguarding the integrity of elections, it would be naïve if you thought
illegal residents are not voting in numbers that are significant.
6) Media have become so lax and useless in
their role as informants of the public that they make it necessary for people
seeking political office to raise enormous amounts of money to get their
message out. This ends up giving us
politicians who owe a lot of very rich people a lot of very large favors
And when
these politicians do get elected, they find a government so unwieldy that
gradual change won’t help it. It’s like
a person so obese, he is confined to bed.
To try to reduce his weight enough so he can resume normal activity
solely by diet would take years, if it is at all possible. His metabolism has become so slow, he would
probably die before achieving any kind of mobility. This person would require radical surgery to
remove an enormous amount of his bulk. I
don’t even know if that is possible. Can
you imagine eliminating a million government employees?
It’s true
that our Founders wanted to make change a slow process in government. That helps to prevent sudden mass swings on
government policies based on public emotions, like we saw happen with the gay
marriage issue. We’ve lost a lot of that
slow process. Courts can now change
major issues overnight. Doesn’t matter
what the people want.
But after
several hundred years, small things have become big things. Small changes over time become big
changes. But small changes are easier to
accept when they occur. Incremental
changes in the same direction over generations will produce huge changes, but
newer generations won’t know what was lost, how far we have come as a nation,
or how it was supposed to look in the first place. We keep getting ‘a new normal’, and only the
older people know what the old normal was.
One example
is that of government agencies.
Originally all lawmaking was to be done by Congress. With the creation of all these various
agencies, thousands of regulations are made every year, which have the impact
of laws. They just don’t call them laws. Otherwise, people might wake up and realize
what’s happening.
Another
example is government assistance. We all
think that having some kind of safety net for people is a good concept. But the number of people or households who
aren’t receiving some kind of government assistance keeps shrinking, and the
government has to borrow money it can’t pay back to pay for it. If you talk about cutting some of this, be
prepared for being portrayed as a heartless SOB. But talking about cutting these benefits
rarely happens, because politicians are afraid of losing these votes.
All these
things have been going on for years, starting small and incrementally
increasing in size and scope, burdening our nation with debt and diminishing
the freedom and wealth of those who live here.
But like the frog being slowly boiled to death as the temperature of the
water rises, those who call for major changes are labelled extremists and
out-of-touch with the national consensus.
We all know
these are problems, but at least they seem to be errors of judgment, natural
human tendencies and faults. Decisions
made for short term gain but failing to see the long term outcomes.
But what
about government actions that are more intentional?
It’s Time for a Second American Revolution Part 2
The Founders
wrote something else besides the Declaration of Independence: the
Constitution. We hear a lot about
whether things are constitutional or not, but we miss the overall goal of the
thing. That will tell us whether we are
even heading in the right direction at all.
The answer to this is found in the Preamble to the Constitution:
“We the
People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice,
insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the
general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our
Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of
America.”
All those
other problems of government can be excused to an extent, but this is where we
can see the real intent of government. I
believe this is where our Founders would take their stand and say, “No more.”
The first
purpose of our government as listed in our founding document is to “form a more
perfect union.”
It would be
helpful before looking at the role of government to look a bit at some
background.
When the
court called supreme removed religion (Christianity) from our schools and our
public life, something that had been a part of them for almost 200 years before
our nation’s founding and 170 years after its founding, something had to be
found to replace it.
A religion
is not simply a system of one’s personal beliefs about God. It’s an all-compassing worldview that
describes all of life. Nations have this
as well as individuals. So while not
everybody in our country was a Christian, Christianity was the worldview under
which our country ran and maintained itself.
That is why Christmas could be a national holiday, why we have a
Thanksgiving, why stores and businesses were closed on Sundays for most of our
history, why the Ten Commandments were posted in schools, courtrooms and government
buildings all across the country, and why there were so few or no government
assistance programs until the 1930s.
Churches and Christian organization did all that for free, i.e. free of
public taxpayer dollars.
When that
court said in 1947 that government cannot “aid religion,” it eventually removed
all mention of God from our schools and public life. A few things remained like the motto on our
coins and a few words in the Pledge of Allegiance, but education became
completely secular. Everything happened
in life without God causing it, motivating it, guiding it, blessing it, and
there certainly was nothing that He commanded people to do so that they knew
how to live.
So a new
moral code and worldview were needed to fill the void. It was obviously secularism, but there was no
complete moral system yet. It had to be
made up as we went along.
The Ten
Commandments were reduced to five guiding inviolable rules: multi-culturalism, tolerance,
equality, fairness, and diversity. Only
tolerance was the responsibility of individuals. The others were the responsibility of
government. But you had to believe in
all of these to be an accepted member of society. If you rejected any of these, you are deemed
as racist, phobic, bigoted, extreme, right-wing, or any combination of these.
Again, these
changes happened gradually. With each
passing generation, people knew less and less about our founding documents and
what concepts like church and state meant. So people learned to live with these things.
But
something changed. A new attitude of government
developed. It is now:
We know
better than you. We will tell you what
to do, we will do what we want, and you will like it.
So go back
to the Preamble. The first goal of government
mentioned is to form a more perfect union.
And just how
do we do that? For years the government
has been pushing diversity. I don’t want
to push exact word meanings here, but diversity means “unlike in kind or
character” and “implies both distinctness and marked contrast 〈such diverse interests as dancing and
football>.”
I’m not
talking about, say, a job field that is almost entirely homogenous in its work
force because people in that work force have sought to exclude others who are
different. I would submit it is wrong to
lower any kinds of standards for those jobs where we get less qualified people
just so we can achieve some kind of diversity.
But the kind
of diversity I am talking about has primarily to do with cultures, where all
cultures are considered as equal, and there is nothing unique or better about
American culture that is worth keeping or protecting. So there is no reason to favor or not favor
any groups of people from coming to our country. In fact those with cultures most like ours
are almost barred from entering, and those with the greatest differences are
not only preferred but sought out.
Our Founders
wanted and expected and formed our government the way they did because they
wanted the nation united. How is a
nation to be perfectly united when its people can’t even agree on the most
basic questions about life? Married
people have a hard time achieving a perfect union, and they enter that
relationship willingly and after having committed themselves to each other in
love. Asking or expecting people to
unite who don’t share the same culture or values is asking quite a bit. I don’t believe a nation has ever done that
before.
The
government is supposed to make things easier for us, not harder. It is not supposed to force things on its
people that they naturally see problems with.
That is not the role of government.
The Preamble
goes on: to insure [sic] domestic tranquility.
Do you know
what tranquility means? Freedom from
disturbance or agitation. It is not the government’s
job to force things on the American people and tell us to like it. No, they would say we are to tolerate
it. Or, put up with it.
The latest
of a long series of government imposed changes to our country is its
immigration policies. It is intent on
bringing into our country as many people as possible with apparently the
greatest cultural differences. Immigrants from countries that helped build
our country are routinely denied entry in favor of people the most disparate.
And now the government
wants to bring in hundreds of thousands of refugees from a culture as far
different from ours as any can be. These
same peoples have been migrating to Europe for generations now. While there are exceptions, they are not
assimilating. They want to create in
Europe the life they had back home. They
want Europe to become like them. When
their numbers are large enough, they will vote their way of life into
existence, and you will learn to like it or live with it. Did you know that Christmas is very offensive
to them? Not the part about exchanging
gifts and having family over, but the part about the birth of Jesus, the Son of
God.
In the past,
we made all of our goods here, so we could absorb new immigrants readily,
because as the numbers of people grew, so did the jobs. But our government essentially drove the
jobs overseas, and now most of the new people coming here will be on public
assistance for years. Paid for with
borrowed money that we will never pay off.
Sure, we
have always been a nation of immigrants.
European immigrants. Was that
because we were racists? No. That’s because it was Europeans who founded
our country, and they thought it wise to preserve the make-up of our
country.
European
countries were all Christian nations, or what could also be described as
Western Civilization. Our schools used
to all teach classes on Western Civilization.
There were reasons why science developed in the West, and human rights,
and property rights, and immense wealth.
Even the poorest people in the United States had more than almost anyone
else in the world.
The main
difference between the United States and Europe is that the United States had the
concept of equality of people and did not have a state church. Europe had a noble class from which they had
their kings, queens, and royalty.
Does this
mean that these other peoples cannot assimilate, or melt in our melting pot? No, but it does mean that previously there
was a lot less to assimilate and that they were more likely to do so.
But we also
had a common all-encompassing worldview that covered all of life. And we taught this to our children in our
schools, and it guided our public life.
Our Founders
broke from the British government, because, in a word, it was not protecting
and promoting our “safety and happiness.”
Got that? They expected the government
to contribute to the happiness of its people.
And that was worth fighting for.
Government
is supposed to work to form a more perfect union, ensure domestic tranquility, promote
the general welfare. and secure “the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our
Posterity.” Our government is hellbent on
doing everything possible to divide our nation, ensure unrest and discord, promote
the welfare of everybody else over its own people, and cripple our posterity
with an unconscionable amount of debt.
Our government
is miserably failing the task given to it by our Founders. Maybe that is worded wrong. That would assume they are even trying. If the Founders were alive today, they would be
thoroughly fed up to the point of abolishing our government and starting over. Unfortunately, there aren’t enough people in
leadership positions today who have the knowledge and wisdom of our Founders to
make it right. And the people don’t have
the moral and Christian values to have the self-restraint to shun government assistance
and the knowledge and strength to debunk secularism, restore a Christian
worldview, and correct the false narratives as to our nation’s history.
In other
words, we need a revolution, but we don’t have the wherewithal right now to
make things better. We need a revival
among the Christians, an active engagement of them in public life, like they
used to do before government made much of it illegal, and, lastly, we need an
education in American history so that we really know what our country is all
about.
