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Every July this nation celebrates its independence from the British Crown and the institution of a federal republic that gave the governed control over the election and maintenance of those who constitute the leadership of the country. The question today is, are we commemorating the most outstanding concept of human government devised by brilliant minds, or are we celebrating a current event, a free nation?
Thinking people must admit that we are a nation where the rule of law has become the tyranny of lawyers, and the government is less representative of the people than of that vague entity entitled "the national interest" -- whatever it happens to be at the time.
The judiciary in our nation has gone beyond applying the law to interpreting the foundational documents of our country and the guarantees of the Bill of Rights which limited the acts of government against the liberties of the governed. Such rights are no longer inviolable, but are subject to judicial review and liberal construction to the extent that the government, more than the people, possesses the "rights" and the force to use them at will.
Only when there is an uprising against such judicial fiat, or congressional acts, is there a return to the vox populus, and few individuals seem to comprehend, except in the most flagrant cases, that freedom is eroded every time a judicial opinion or new law restricts any article in the Bill of Rights, or any portion thereof.
Congress has always been political, and divided, but now the entire body (regardless of platform or stated ideology) has drifted into the mindset of the globalists, that is, to the left, toward a socialist nation rather than a nation of free individuals who consent to be governed. We do well to remember that Rome was once a republic, but became an empire, and then disintegrated from within so that it could no longer defend against attacks from without.
Every inch of responsibility that government takes from the individual by making new laws and instituting new programs to provide for the people what they should provide for themselves makes the people less responsible and more dependent on "father government." Or on Big Brother, in the more popular nomenclature. The state takes over what the individual should do, then it takes control of the children, and the voice of the people is restricted so that "freedom of speech" is limited to freely agreeing with the government agenda.
On this precipice we stand, in July of 2002, edging closer to full governmental control of children and adults, and the danger of having a form of republic that is in fact an oligarchy of the few. In simple terms, we stand on the verge of tyranny while being reminded daily of our historic freedoms as they are legislated away or twisted by judicial review and opinion. Not only do we stand on this precipice, but we are paying huge sums, via taxation, for the maintenance of the tyrants who are pushing us over it. If this is freedom, it is one that our founders would have abhorred, one that we should abhor. Yet we proclaim we are free because we can still purchase the automobile or house of our choice, within our financial means to do so. That form of faux liberty exists under any regime of tyranny.
There is no such thing as absolute freedom if there are more than two people on the planet. Law is needful because people will not willingly be ruled by integrity, nor is it human nature to be lawful. If you need proof of this, put two toys and three children in a playpen. There must be laws, but it is the operation of law itself, the construction of that law, that differentiates between the rule of law and the tyranny of law. That is why the founding fathers penned the documents they did. These men well knew both the human desire for freedom and the human penchant for lawlessness. They had seen the horrific abuses of "law" in Europe under the so-called divine rights of kings and queens, which lopped off many a head for little more than speaking the wrong thing at the wrong time or place.
Our nation guaranteed to all its citizens the God-given rights to life, liberty and the pursuit (not the achievement) of happiness. Government has been restricted by the Bill of Rights from inhibiting freedom of speech, religion and the press. People were guaranteed the right to bear arms against intruders and against a renegade government that attempted to usurp the rights of the people or subjugate them and suspend their freedoms. We were given ballot boxes for the election of those who would represent our interests (rather than their own) in both houses of Congress and in the Executive Office.
By hook, crooks and bureaucracy, by agenda and design, these freedoms have eroded. We live in an era that is highly restricted in areas of personal freedom of its citizens, and wide open on its borders to those who illegally enter the country, many to do no more than destroy it if they have or make the opportunity. That is not the will of the people, it is the march of the agenda toward no-border villages in a globalist community. How did we come to this point? Because of lack of integrity of parties and leadership, the rule of the rich over the masses who are not, and the Marxist agenda to bring down the capitalist structure. The crooked capitalists have also left their hoof prints on the desecration of the capitalist dream by making capitalism a dirty word, the symbol of man's unbridled greed, avarice and corruption, just as totalitarianism has left its marks in blood on the pavement of many a Tienanmen Square or Dachau.
America's founders had a quality that seems to mean little to many these days -- integrity. It is integrity that led George Washington to step down from the presidency and give America great wisdom in his farewell address. It is integrity that flowed through the presidencies of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. Those who were instrumental in founding this nation knew that no law, no founding documents, no words on paper, could survive if man's corruption prevailed.
The downturn of America's original vision for a free nation, and the erosion of those freedoms, as well as the diminishing character of its leaders has been visible for decades now. How do George Washington's cautions about our national involvements compare with Richard Nixon's courting of China and his famous "I'm not a crook" speech? What a pitiful and yet dreadful decline in morality, in vision, in agenda. Yet a mere twenty-four years later, the nation would have its second presidential impeachment (but not conviction) of a man whose concepts of morality seem to have been spawned in some primordial ooze. This notion that a leader can be above the law to the extent that even Nixon could not achieve was perhaps the low tide of America's existence.
Now we have a wartime president in a state of perpetual war against the ideology of evil, when such a war is not one of state, but of character and intent.
We also have less personal freedom than at any time since the war between the states when then-president Abraham Lincoln attempted to impose martial law upon our citizens, consolidated the union, and left the nation with a more powerful centralized government than was ever intended by the founders. It is on this centralized focus of power over the people that our present growing oligarchy and bureaucracies are built.
It is obvious that absent the integrity of the people, who demand the same of their leaders, that the entire concept of "freedom" in America is the commemoration of an experiment that appears doomed to failure.
The fourth of July might well be the commemoration of the Declaration of Independence and the celebration of hot dogs, buns and beer with occasional firecrackers and Roman candles.
We do well to remember that ceremony, pomp and circumstance do not make fact, nor does the celebration of the concept of a free people make the people free.
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