The United States of America, in the late 18th century, formed a country and adopted a constitution like no other nation on earth. For the first time in recorded history the citizens of a governmental entity chose to codify how the people of the country are sovereign and the government’s authority over the people of the country was restricted only to a handful of issues.
Benjamin Franklin, one of the most well-known Founding Fathers, was asked upon his exit from the Constitutional Convention on September 17, 1787, what kind of government was formed, a republic or a monarchy. He replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.”
Frankin was under no illusion that the government and the Constitution were perfect. In fact, the process of getting to its adoption was contentious and several members of the delegation to the Convention refused to sign the final document. He knew that the fledgling experiment in self-government was not going to be a cakewalk, and that forming a government with “we the people” as sovereign was only the beginning.
I never thought of myself as interested in history. BOOORRRRRINNNG! In high school, made to memorize a bunch of dates about things that happened long before I was alive, I couldn’t imagine any relevance to the life I was preparing to live.
I couldn’t have been more wrong. But I didn’t realize that until after I’d served a peaceful stint in the Air Force, been married for 30 years, lived the American dream I’d grown up believing in.
For my parent’s generation, I think Pearl Harbor Day was a rude awakening to realizing that we the people have to constantly be vigilant about working to keep America a free country. For me and most of my generation, that rude awakening occurred on 9/11.
I remember my dad telling me that government is corrupt and no one in government is trustworthy. Dad lived in Wisconsin his whole life except for the 2 years he served in the Army after World War II. He was terribly cynical, though not particularly vocal about politics. This cynicism was probably fueled by the fact that a Wisconsin senator, Joseph McCarthy (who served in the Senate from 1947-1957), was the most visible public face of cold war, anti-communism tensions in the country.
In retrospect, Senator McCarthy was the canary in the coal mine about what was really happening to the United States government. It was becoming infiltrated by socialism and communism from within.
Communism’s 45 goals were read into the United States Congressional Record by Congressman Albert S. Herlong Jr., (D-Florida), in 1963. It’s astonishing to read those goals today and see how much closer we are in this country to communism than to capitalism.
Boiling frog, much?
We the People are responsible for the predicament we’re currently in, which is a war for the heart and soul and trustworthiness of our elected officials. The fact that we’ve held onto a government where the people are still sovereign is remarkable in light of what I now know and understand about history. And though it doesn’t seem like it some days, the fact that we are still a nation that limits government’s power over its people is thanks to the Constitution that was adopted way back on September 17, 1787. Studying the most recent Supreme Court decisions over questions of government authority is a lesson of how powerfully that Constitution guards our individual liberty, and how thankful we should be that it is still holding up to its original intent nearly 240 years later.
Only a couple of months after the Constitution was adopted, Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to William Stephens Smith, a son-in-law of John Adams, wrote that “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” In other words, freedom is not free. If we the people want to keep the freedom in the United States of America as the Founding Fathers intended it, we the people must make an on-going effort to maintain it.
I believe we are in a war right now for the heart and soul of freedom in America. Thankfully, it is (mostly) not a shooting war.
Instead, those who desire to exercise power and control over our freedom are trying to win the war by subverting our minds and hearts. If you are intellectually honest, you can see how that is happening, exactly in line with the 45 goals of communism. There’s an oft repeated quote, “We will take America without a shot, we will destroy you from within” attributed to Karl Marx, who wrote a 1948 pamphlet called The Communist Manifesto. There’s no evidence Karl Marx actually said that, but students of history can see how he might have actually said it. And how true it is today.
I know there are those who won’t believe, and possibly outright reject, what I have to say in the rest of this post. I am not trying to convince you to believe what I think to be true. I am simply telling you what I, as an intellectually honest, intensely interested, student of history, have studied and observed.
I make a concerted effort to find truth amid all the bu11sh*t fed to us by media and government and other authorities who should be trustworthy but aren’t. Some don’t even know they aren’t trustworthy and honest, they actually believe what they are saying. They are, I think, where I was years ago. I couldn’t conceive of the enormity of false, misleading, and partially true information it would take to subvert Americans and steer them away from truth, justice, and the American Way. I didn’t think the majority of the 537 elected federal lawmakers (435 Congress, 100 Senate, a President and a Vice-President) could be corrupted enough to infiltrate the United States government. I was wrong. They are wrong.
As I said, we are in a non-shooting war for the heart and soul of a free America. This war is being waged through media, social media, entertainment, stories we are told, twisted to present only what they want us to know and believe so we are influenced to think and to act in a certain way. It is a war using each and every one of us as combatants. It pits family members and friends against each other. Some of the issues are more horrifying than anything you can imagine. And each of us, unwittingly in many cases, have chosen sides.
My conclusion is that President Trump is leading the charge to return government to trustworthiness, to individual freedom, and to being controlled by “we the people.”
I am willing to debate this issue with anyone willing to be intellectually honest about it, but you’d better bring facts. You know, those pesky things proven by history that go further back than you can imagine if you haven’t studied it. Because what you think you know to be true is probably just things you’ve heard from a source you thought of as trustworthy, but that you never 1) checked (the source) for yourself, 2) verified (the facts) for yourself, and 3) looked at it from any other viewpoint than the one you have stuck in your mind.
My prayer for the last 17 years is that truth will be revealed, justice will be done, and America will be restored to the greatness envisioned by the Founding Fathers.
P.S. If you haven’t read the Constitution, you should. It’s not hard to find. I have a copy on my desk. If you’d like a copy for yourself, let me know. I’ll make sure you get one.
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