By nearly any measure one might say that America’s greatest days have handed. We’re hopelessly mired in debt. Hundreds of thousands of able-bodied People are unemployed and practically half our inhabitants is now on the federal government dole in a method or one other. We’re in the present day as politically polarized as I’ve seen in my lifetime. We’re struggling beneath the boot of an oppressive regulatory and tax atmosphere. Our fourth property, the media, has withdrawn from any pretense of journalism or fact searching for. And our ethical compass, our ‘agency reliance on divine windfall’ seems all however forgotten.
Ought to I point out that greater than 50 million American lives have been snuffed out within the identify of ‘ladies’s rights’? Or that we incarcerate extra per capita than any developed nation? That almost a 3rd of our kids are being raised with out a father (15,000,000) and one other 5 million with out a mom?
Wherever you look – whether or not public training, authorities establishments, the political local weather, massive enterprise, the household unit or the religion group – we’re failing.
So how is it that our ‘shining metropolis on a hill’ has misplaced its luster?
To know our failures we should first perceive the causal drivers of our success – what enabled the experiment to work. Within the easiest phrases, America succeeded as a result of its embrace of household, religion and freedom.
The colonies have been populated, in massive measure, by these searching for spiritual freedom. Quakers, Puritans and others established themselves and their governance round Biblical rules and mores. From the Mayflower Compact to the governing paperwork of the unique colonies, all have been knowledgeable by Judeo-Christian values and truths.
Our Founders totally embraced this heritage with its articulation of the legal guidelines of nature and of nature’s God because the important threads in defining how man ought to lead his life and work together along with his fellow residents. The framers’ worldview was that these rights have been unalienable and common. They belonged to man, having been gifted by nature’s God. The Declaration of Independence expressed a finite definition of those rights. It centered on 5 rules of the legal guidelines of nature and of nature’s God. They’re:
- That every one individuals are created by God, and that by advantage of this circumstance are entitled to be handled equally earlier than the regulation
- That every one individuals are endowed by God with sure unalienable rights.
- The individuals are additionally endowed with the proper to manipulate themselves in accordance with their written consent.
- The individuals retain the proper to change or abolish an illegal type of authorities as an train of self-government.
- The individuals are free to arrange the civil authorities’s powers in such a approach as to safe their happiness (property).
The Structure embodied this view and served to assemble a civil authorities able to sustaining these rights. Federal powers have been enumerated (restricted and finite) and people not particularly granted belonged to the states and the individuals.
This was the thought of America – self-reliance, self-government – a free individuals safe of their rights to life, liberty and property. The concept of America was the popularity that man was meant to reside free to pursue his greatest and that the position of presidency was to guard and defend the rights of the person.
The Founders knew that it was the character of governments to ever creep towards tyranny. That they had lived it. And they also went in regards to the work of establishing roadblocks to forestall that eventuality – unalienable rights, enumerated powers, vesting of powers to the states and the individuals, separation of powers and co-equal branches. However the Founders have been equally foresighted to know that the framework they arrange by way of the Structure was solely enough if the individuals have been good and ethical. As John Adams acknowledged, “Our Structure was made just for an ethical and spiritual individuals. It’s wholly insufficient to the federal government of another.”
Quick ahead just a few hundred years and reply the query – are we nonetheless that ‘ethical and spiritual individuals’ and, if not, how and why did we lose this vital societal and cultural lynchpin?
Whereas governmental erosions of liberty intermittently occurred, most notably throughout the tenures of the dynamic duo of Woodrow Wilson (the revenue tax and the Federal Reserve) and Franklin Roosevelt (the place do I begin?), one might argue that whereas we have been much less free, we have been in essence nonetheless these ‘ethical and spiritual individuals’ within the Fifties and into the Sixties. However the seeds of our decline have been being sown for all that to alter. Civil society was about to convulse.
Our nation was in turmoil. Race relations had taken middle stage and America wanted to come back to grips with its second-class citizenry, the blacks. A lot of the South remained segregated. The Ku Klux Klan terrorized any blacks that did not know their place. Jim Crow legal guidelines dominated. As Congress debated and finally handed the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, two competing actions have been effervescent up, the peaceable civil protests of Martin Luther King and the violence and anarchy of the Black Panthers.
On the similar time, America was dealing with an exceedingly unpopular conflict in Vietnam. The anti-war motion was rising, mushrooming out from our schools and universities. Protection of sit-ins, demonstrations and riots stuffed the airwaves, as did the every day physique counts from Vietnam. From Berkeley to the streets of Chicago to Kent State, the depth of this wrestle escalated together with the race conflict. The College students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the Climate Underground (of Invoice Ayers fame) splashed on the scene, railing not solely towards the conflict but in addition violently rejecting the very establishments and mores of civil society. Their calling was violent revolution, foreseeing some 25 million deaths to attain their ends – some convoluted, quasi-socialist state. Ayers and his ‘Alinskyites’ have been attempting to recruit the extra radical and violent parts of the race wrestle into their fold (Black Panthers, Malcolm X) to stand up and take the federal government down.
Worry, confusion and division had gripped the nation because it watched or learn the information. President Lyndon Johnson reacted along with his ‘Nice Society’ and ‘Battle on Poverty’ initiatives. However Johnson, a staunch opponent of the Civil Rights Act, and never precisely a buddy to blacks, was constructing, by way of these packages, an ever-faithful voting block (the blacks and the poor), a everlasting underclass. Johnson succeeded in placing the blacks again on the plantation, solely this time a authorities plantation. Reliance on authorities and the sufferer class have been born and being properly fed. Too, our modern race baiters (Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Louis Farrakhan) have been getting their legs.
Maybe the best tragedy in these years was the truth that Martin Luther King was succeeding, the proper approach, by exhibiting the nice individuals of America the injustices perpetrated towards his race and interesting to their humanity. Tragically, King’s dream of equality and lifting up his individuals (and all individuals) was subverted by others who noticed extra energy and fortune in fomenting, twisting and sustaining that sufferer standing.
Sure, the sixties gave us the ‘Summer time of Love’; a rising counterculture; the hippies; flag, draft card and bra burning; a budding feminist motion, a number of lifeless our bodies, and a quickly rising authorities. But it surely additionally burned into the progressive ‘bible’ the effectiveness of taking part in the sufferer card and tugging on the nice nature (or guilt) of the American individuals.
This cabal has been efficient in convincing People that abortion is just an assertion of ‘ladies’s rights’, that ‘equity’ means taking from a producer to redistribute to a ne’er do properly, that marriage solely between a person and a girl is discriminatory, that indiscriminate intercourse for teenagers is simply effective, and that God has no place within the public sq.. Their god is ethical relativism, entitlement and authorities. Their purpose (as was the case with communism and fascism) is to bury Christianity and morality, to undermine the church and the household, and substitute their conventional roles with a behemoth authorities.
They seen the federal government because the giver of all issues, the ethical authority, the definer of values, and the good societal leveler.
They’ve been spectacularly profitable. Immediately a valedictorian that dares utter a phrase of reward to God or Jesus has his or her mike turned off. Christians are belittled and mocked for his or her religion. The profitable are scorned. Revenue is evil. Returning troopers or these espousing the Structure are to be placed on a terror watch checklist. Unlawful aliens are undocumented aliens. “I am from the IRS and I’m right here to assist”.
Face it, of us, our world has been turned the wrong way up, by design. And because it has taken a number of generations to get us right here, it is going to additionally probably take the identical to reverse.
To seek out the answer, I look to the targets of the Progressives – the church buildings, the standard household unit, academia and media. The battle is misplaced in Washington, D.C. And whereas we should nonetheless interact and struggle on this area, the true battle is native.
Prescription #1
We have to awaken our preachers and pastors and enlist them to face up for nature’s God and the legal guidelines of nature. We should not enable them to any longer cower in worry of the IRS and their tax-exempt standing, or their worry of shedding congregants by talking out towards ethical relativism and immoral governmental actions. Speak along with your ft if your house of worship would not align itself with the rules and intent of the Structure. Allow them to know why and study from the expertise. The church buildings have the attain to assist flip the tide. They usually have an inherent responsibility to help and defend the rules, as does each citizen. Assist the Black Gown Regiment!
Prescription #2
Ought to the present tendencies proceed within the public training system, we might quickly be dealing with a military of little brown shirts. The faculties, the textbooks, and the curriculum must be regularly vetted and known as out positively or negatively as applicable. I’m additionally quaint sufficient to assume that the Pledge of Allegiance ought to reenter the faculties as ought to the chance to hope (purely optionally available for my agnostic and atheist associates). Should not residents of a rustic based on the legal guidelines of nature and nature’s God be permitted (not required) to hope at school?
And is a present of respect and allegiance to the image of our Republic so distasteful? College Boards and lecturers are all locals. Get to know them, or be one. Cease sending your hard-earned {dollars} to the Progressive cesspools that so a lot of our ‘institutes of upper studying’ have develop into.
Prescription #3
The mainstream media has deserted the pursuit of fact and are willingly aiding and abetting the Progressive agenda. Supporting trusted voices is a begin. However as pervasive because the media misinformation cartel is, the extra immediately and personally we talk with others the higher. Weblog, converse up and struggle the lies.
Prescription #4
Get along with others domestically that share conventional American values. There’s energy in numbers – evangelize. We hold one another knowledgeable and conscious – there may be far an excessive amount of happening for one particular person to maintain up. Be a power in your native precinct/county group. That is the place the political motion takes place. This can be a cultural conflict and we should assert and defend the values we cherish.
Prescription #5 – My legislative Dream Listing
Get on board to: Abolish the IRS and enact the FairTax; finish the Fed; repeal Dodd-Frank and Obamacare; considerably reform Medicare/Medicaid and Social Safety; abolish the Departments of Schooling, Homeland Safety, Labor, EPA, and shake up the remainder, redefining their objectives and stripping out any exercise not supportive of these objectives; time period restrict Congress, and finish crony Capitalism.
So, can the thought of America be saved? Sure, so long as it stays within the coronary heart of 1 citizen. However restoring our nation will take a technology.
Oh, and may we please have a President that believes in, and treasures, the Concept of America.
