Our
forefathers fought a war in order to be able to establish the government they
gave us. Our government is failing the
American people by not doing what they created it for.
The purposes
of our government are outlined in the Preamble to the Constitution. The first two purposes, in order to form a
more perfect union and to establish justice, were covered in the first article,
The third purpose of our government is to insure [sic]
domestic tranquility.
Tranquility is not a word you will hear to describe life in
the United States. There is another word
that was often used in the early days of our country to describe the people
here. The Declaration of Independence
used it when talking about this new government that they wanted to form. That word is happiness.
Our Founders established our government to promote the
happiness of the American people, to see that our country lives in
tranquility. Just to be clear. To be tranquil means to be “quiet; calm;
undisturbed; peaceful; not agitated, free from disturbance or turmoil.
Our country has never been lass tranquil than it is right
now, and there are two basic reasons for this.
And both of them have their sources in government.
The first reason that our country is not tranquil, or happy,
is that the political left, the Progressives, Democrats are trying to compel
fundamental changes to our country. They
insist that the United States, both now and throughout its history, has been,
frankly, wrong. On what? Just about everything. And they are trying to change that.
But there are two problems here: The first is that, while the Founders would
have welcomed a vigorous debate over the principles and values of our country,
there is no debate, no discussion, no dialogue here. They feel that there is nothing to debate,
discuss, or dialogue about. In fact, the
Progressives, the left, the Democrats prefer to compel people to, if not agree,
at least not oppose their ideals.
They do this in two ways:
The first is that they will use the court system either to intimidate
those who might oppose them or to essentially write laws that compel compliance
with their views. The second way is
through social activism, primarily mass protests, that attempts to shame those
who disagree with them into compliance.
The second problem with the Democratic, leftist, Progressive
agenda is that they deny the foundational principle of our country: that we are
endowed by our creator with unalienable rights.
That statement alone establishes that our country has a religious, specifically
Christian, foundation. They insist that
our nation has always been and was intended to be a secular nation.
But if we are a secular nation, then we don’t have
unalienable rights. We only have such
rights as the government allows us. And
we have lost the foundation principle of our country, the one that makes / made
us what we are, a unique nation.
While there are many particular issues in the left/Progressive/Democratic
agenda, it is important to be aware of the underlying assumptions that guide it.
If an issue
is divisive, or controversial, or contentious, it is not the place of the
government to assume the high moral ground and decide for the people what it
will do. The government gets its
authority from the people. They have
reversed that today. When the people
have decided on an issue, then it’s time for the government to act.
One example
here is Planned Parenthood. Abortion is
certainly one of the most divisive issues in our country, yet the government
insists on using millions of dollars of taxpayer money to fund it. This is not a case where the government is
deriving its authority from the people.
In fairness
to the Democrats, Progressives, the left, most of the issues that they talk about
the most and insist most strongly on, they see as rights issues. And this will take a separate article to
discuss fully.
Basically,
they see the country as fundamentally flawed, and it requires a fundamental
makeover to get it right, and it is not going willingly. So that is why they need to protest, riot,
scream, and even get hostile and violent at times. It is all justified to get our country off
the wrong track and onto the right one.
The left, Democrats,
Progressives, reject the idea that our rights come from God and insist that the
government provides them. And the very
idea of rights changes when God is removed from this picture.
Our country
was founded on unalienable rights given to us by God, and the Founders decided
to list some of them in the Bill of Rights.
They were all things that we could do without government intrusion and
in some cases, protections that the government had to provide, as in court
cases.
Now rights
have become what the government must provide for people, whether citizens or
not, and what people must do for other people, whether they want to or not. This is not the liberty our Founders had in
mind when they established our country.
The right to
freedom of speech must be curtailed if it infringes on a person’s right not to
be offended. People have to give more of
their money to government to give to those who have less.
Charity has always
been a major part of American life, but it was always done voluntarily. Now the government has assumed that role and
driven the country into unsustainable debt with almost no possibility of getting
out of it. But that is for another
article.
The second
reason that our country is not happy or tranquil is that our government is more
concerned about people who are not citizens of our country than those who
are. This is not to say that these other
people are not needier than our own citizens.
But just as there are needier
people in the world than my own children, my first responsibility is still to
my own children. And our government
exists to take care of its own people first.
That’s why it was created.
If it fails
to do what it was intended to do, then we have the right to replace it, and our
Founders expected that we would. That was why we replaced the English
government of the colonies with one of our own creation. It was not looking out for our interests
first.
Is it
selfish, exploitive, discriminatory, and racist for our government to take care
of our own citizens before considering the needs of other people in the world? No. Remember
that our government gives more money in foreign aid than any other country in
the world, a lot more.
When a mother
takes care of her own children before other needy children, is she being
selfish, exploitive, discriminatory, or racist?
No. Is she supposed to look at all
the needy children of the world and choose the most needy and focus her attention
and resources on them before her own children?
Again, no.
This is why
God created mothers and fathers.. Children
need an extraordinary level of care that is usually best provided by its birth
parents. And our government exists for the same reason:
to take care of its citizens. If the
citizens want to do something for other people, they can, and they do. But that is not the government’s job, unless
the people give it authority and direction to do so.
Domestic tranquility. The happiness of the people. The left, Progressives, Democrats will insist
that we as a nation have deprived an ever-increasing number of people in this
country of those very things, and they are best suited to remedy that problem. They believe it is past time for discussion,
because we as a nation are too blind to see our own faults. Our prejudices are too ingrained, too
inherent for any hope of change, so they, and our government, must force these
changes on the American people.
Two very
different visions of and for our country.
Is there any way to bridge the two and bring peace again to our country?
The first
and most important thing that we must do is to try to restore the vision of our
Founders. The left, Progressives,
Democrats will insist that they were flawed too and times have changed. The problem with that is that when you want
to fundamentally change a country, you have essentially conquered it, just without
all the death and destruction of a typical war.
But that’s for the next article.
