What have we done, and how did we get to where we are? As I sit here in my home on New Year’s Eve 2009, I am taking a chance that I may be representative of thousands – possibly millions – of average American citizens who are contemplating the last year and asking themselves those same questions. The answers to those questions are frankly what’s prompting me to write, because they are scaring the hell out of me.
As I sit here at the dawn of a new decade, I like these many others find myself filled with worry that the greatest nation in the world - the last bastion of freedom for mankind in this world - is slipping away from us. How did we get here? How is it that in a relatively short period of time, we have allowed the great gift we were given by the founders of this nation 233 years ago to slip away? And most importantly, who is responsible for this?!?
WE ARE... YOU ARE and I AM. Yes, it’s true… and if you don’t like that answer, it’s time to wake up and smell the stench of liberty being incinerated. Like the legendary video images of books being thrown onto bonfires in World War II era Germany, our liberties have been and continue to be slowly being tossed onto an ideological bonfire and reduced to ashes WITH OUR CONSENT! Because it’s not just in the last year. It’s been going on for decades, right under our noses. And if you get your information from network news, Time magazine and the NY Times, then you are completely confused. “It all seems to complicated, how do you know what’s true, how do you know where to begin, how to understand how it all fits together and how do you know what you can do?” First off, you need to understand one thing – those feelings you are having are by design. You need to understand the truth.
The truth is that WE THE PEOPLE have consented to all of this. We feed the power of people who intentionally work to keep the citizenry in ignorance. We give this anti-liberty movement life! We encourage it every day, and have been for many years. We feed it. This is the unavoidable truth many are beginning to realize now, and that we all must realize.
Now I know that in response to my assertion that YOU (and I) are responsible for where we are by asking “How can you make such a claim? After all, it’s those greedy politicians and Wall Street types who have been causing all the problems!” No… it’s you. You won’t be able to understand everything in one sitting, in one article or one book. To fully understand what is happening will be a steady educational process. But it is a problem that you must solve – we must solve – for us as citizens concerned about their futures and the future of their families to come together before it’s too late.
The first step in solving any problem is admitting you have a problem. Without that, nothing changes, nothing is fixed and the road to ruin continues unabated. Consider this:
• We have allowed ourselves to be educated into ignorance. We have allowed others to render the importance of the founding of our country to a few anecdotal fairy tales. The importance of God and Judeo-Christian beliefs in the founding of this country is grossly played down or ignored altogether.
• We have taken political correctness completely over the cliff as we grant the rights of American citizens to enemies that actively attack our homeland, and openly admit to wanting to kill as many Americans as possible. At the same time, we submit grandma to full cavity searches by airport security so that we might discover that most dangerous of weapons in her possession – her knitting needles… while known Islamic radicals board US-bound planes unabated with bombs they intend to detonate.
• We allow ourselves to be taxed into oblivion. The taxation imposed by the British crown prior to the American Revolution was far lighter than we have today. And in case you haven’t heard, your taxes are about to go substantially higher this coming year.
• We allow the mainstream media and big government politicians lecture us on how government is the solution to all of our problems, while also allowing those same ideologically-biased entities to subdue and derail any investigation into them as the cause.
• Patriotic dissenting voices that favor individual liberty and limited government are trashed on a regular basis on nearly every television channel and newspaper, i.e. the “Tea Party” movement (often maligned in the media as “Tea-baggers”) that has inspired many Americans across the political spectrum.
So what do we do? We the People need to acknowledge that it’s our fault – all of us, regardless of age, race, gender or so-call “social status”. We have allowed the greatest gift ever given from one group of persons to its subsequent generations to whither because we have neglected it. President Ronald Reagan pointed out that freedom is always one generation away from being lost. Well, we’re there… and our current generations will determine the fate of liberty.
The Declaration of Independence states, “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…” We must acknowledge we have not been educated properly. That fact in and of itself may not have been our fault. But in acknowledging this, we must also take the non-trivial challenge to become educated – there’s more to learn than most of us know. We need to force our representative government to earn our consent, or else they will lose it. We owe it to our families, our children and our posterity. Start the journey now.
