“A society that will trade a little liberty for a little order will lose both, and deserve neither.”
“God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion.
The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is
wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts
they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions,
it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. …
And what country can preserve its liberties, if it’s rulers are not
warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of
resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as
to the facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost
in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed fromtime to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.”
~ quotes from Thomas Jefferson, 3rd President of the United States
The above quotes from Thomas Jefferson are quite striking to me. Though he was quite a conflicted man in many different ways, his patriotism was unwavering. It’s funny how history tends to repeat itself. Are we on the brink of another American Revolution? The citizenry of this country is restless. They see the things that are going on in this country, collapse of the economy, the weakening of the dollar, the tentacles of our military might overreaching, the corruption of our nation’s leaders being exposed to the nth degree; not to mention some of the other social ills that plague us: we have the blood of millions of murdered babies on our hands, acquitting the guilty and convicting the innocent.
There are so many problems in this country that it’s overwhelming. It’s not a matter of simply knowing where to start. This ship called America has sprouted so many leaks; and they all need to be plugged–now! So many fires need to be put out. Since the waning disaster that was Pres. George W. Bush’s 2nd term, we’ve been sold a tainted bill of goods. It all started on Pres. Bush’s watch. While I do believe that Mr. Bush did many good things for this country, once he got re-elected, he stopped caring about “we the people.” Two of the biggest slaps in the face were the Immigration Reform bill that he and Sen. John McCain were trying to force down our collective throats. All under the pretense that the politicians are better equipped to know what’s going on rather than trust the public outcry. The biggest lapse in Bush’s judgement was the initial TARP “Bailout” bill. This was a bitter pill that we were forced to swallow, all because the private banking cartel known as the Federal Reserve was in cahoots with the Treasury Department. Their message was clear and their tactic was simple. The message was: “This is an emergency,” “we must do something quickly,” and my personal favorite “these businesses are too big to fail.” Mr. Bush, wanting to redeem his legacy and wanting to be remembered for something other than the War on Terror, decided to forego some of his basic beliefs in the free market system, and give carte blanche authority to the Treasury Secretary to print an embarassing amount of money to distribute to his buddies on Wall Street. What’s worse is that Congress decided to hijack this TARP bill and add so much more spending to this bill. All for their little pet projects, anything that would help them get re-elected. It’s disgusting, really.
Now, Pres. Obama, who still has yet to prove that he is constitutionally eligible to hold the highest office in this country, has taken the worst piece of legislation ever enacted during my lifetime and has made the problem exponentially worse. All this was rammed through in late-night, backroom deals with Members of Congress. Wake up, America!!
What do all these things have in common: Obama’s refusal to produce documentation (Hawaii’s long-form birth certificate), the refusal of America’s court system to hold him accountable, the “bailout” bills being rammed through, effectively subjugating our grandchildren and great-granchildren to a tax burden they didn’t ask for nor had a vote on (smells like “taxation without representation” to me, folks!), the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? They are all symptoms of a much larger problem. We are letting our leaders and the media do our thinking for us. We have allowed the media to tell us how to think and what to feel. We have stopped using our brains. We no longer understand what it means to use critical thinking skills. This is quite evident in the public education system where students are simply taught to accept the status quo of what their instructors and textbooks tell them, and not to question, not to reason. As one example, if the theory of evolution is even remotely questioned in any public education setting, school officials immediately close ranks and try to silence or marginalize that individual that is doing the questioning. If you don’t believe me, you can do the research yourself. It’s sobering in both its breadth and scope.
How does this all tie in to the above quotes from Thomas Jefferson? Simply put, the things that our government is doing, all in the name of the collective, societal good, is rapidly encroaching & tearing away our individual liberties. Where our nation’s founders experienced such a tyrranical government, they did what they believed God was calling them to do. They resisted, all in the name of God-given individual rights. The right to succeed and the right to fail on the wings of their own efforts, creativity and ingenuity. They considered it their duty to form a more perfect union. While these TEA Parties across the country have been timely and needed, I fear that the populous doesn’t have the stomach, the werewithal, the fortitude, to resist such approaching tyrrany. Sure, we’ll call our elected representatives, we’ll send letters expressing our dissension, but we won’t hurt them where it really counts. At the ballot box. (I’m preaching as much to myself as everybody else here as well.) We don’t take time out of our day to go to a town hall meeting and respectfully call out our leaders when they are betraying our trust. Overall, I believe we’ve somehow been lulled to sleep over the years, we’ve been desensitized to the ails that plague us. We don’t own the problems we face. We blame others, we don’t accept responsibility. I’m not suggesting that we all take up pitchforks & rifles or anything like that, but I am hoping that we all begin to care a little more about what goes on in this country, and have the forethought to see how it will affect us, our children, our grandchildren.
