On The Importance Of Our Founding Principles: A Speech To Hillsdale College Major Donors

Thank you for your invitation to be here today and I am very honored that you should ask me not only to join you in the observance of Constitution Week, but also permit me to express my respect and admiration for Hillsdale College and to thank each of you for everything you have done to make their tireless efforts possible.

Now, I confess that I am not able to call myself a Hillsdale graduate nor can I lay claim to any formal affiliation with you. But, nonetheless, I come here as a very great beneficiary of your commitment to the founding principles of our Republic.

And I have to admit that my first encounter with these sacred truths came through rather uncommon means: not as a student at a college nor as a participant in our nation’s great public policy debate, but rather as a small boy in the heart of the Soviet Union.

I remember vividly the week before my parents, my brother, my grandmother and I left Moscow for the United States. As we went to say good-bye to my uncle in St. Petersburg, Russian authorities ransacked our little apartment full of boxes and bags packed with our meager belongings, looking for any cursory reason to rescind our exit visas.

We returned to a scene of utter chaos with upended furniture and boxes, their once neatly-folded contents now punctuating the dull carpet with specks of color. My mom and especially my dad, whose doctorate in physics had subjected him to a lifetime of surveillance, which only intensified as we neared our departure day, were stoic. In this insult they saw yet another manifestation of an increasingly desperate tyranny.

My brother, however, was only 6 years old at the time and he was apoplectic, clinging to my mother and crying hysterically. And forever etched into my memory were her words to Eugene: “Don’t cry sweetie,” she said. “Don’t be upset. In just two days we are leaving for America. This won’t ever happen there.”

In my formative years, I often wondered what must have been that great force, which inspired my parents to persevere through searches and surveillance, through threats of arrest and job terminations all in the pursuit of America for themselves and their posterity.

And as I reflected on that fateful October day when our world was upended by the KGB, the resolve in my mother’s words explained it all: “We are leaving for America. This won’t ever happen there.”

And seeing the resolve of my blind 88-year-old grandmother to become an American citizen exploded that realization into bold colors. My grandmother was born in 1911 – 6 years before the Russian revolution. One day right after the revolution, a band of communist marauders arrived at her parents’ doorstep to remedy a serious offense: the crime being that my grandmothers’ parents happened to own a house. Exercising a crude Russian version of eminent domain, the thugs ordered that the house be immediately turned over to the local Communist Party. When my grandmother’s dad protested, he was taken away – never to be seen again – and the rest of the family expelled from their home.

My grandmother spent the next seven decades nurturing a quiet, but nonetheless fervent determination to persevere through the miseries of communism long enough to someday see freedom firsthand. She finally arrived in the United States at the age of 82, resolved to do whatever it took to spend her final years as an American citizen. For her that meant spending over a year clutching an old black tape player, on which my dad recorded questions and answers to the naturalization exam that she muttered to herself day in and day out.

And in the year 2000, aged 88 and completely blind, she presented herself to the Immigration and Naturalization Service examiner. The examiner was stunned: she had never before seen a blind 88-year-old so determined to pass the citizenship test, which she did with flying colors. Four years later my grandmother passed away – a patriotic American citizen and voter – proud to the last day of completing her journey from servitude to liberty.

We are indeed accustomed to seeing fortunes rise and fall, economies blossom and wither, governments alternate between good public policy and bad, but as long as America exists as we know it, this ever-changing world is assured one great constant: the allegiance of Americans to their founding principles of limited government and individual liberty; that rights come neither from government nor a committee of men that indeed they come from Nature and Nature’s God and that it is the duty of government to protect these rights from infringement.

So, what makes us Americans? Is it just a tie by blood to this land? Or is it something more?

In a speech commemorating Independence Day of 1858, Lincoln answered this very important question with these words:

“We find a race of men living in that day whom we claim as our fathers and grandfathers; they were iron men, they fought for the principle that they were contending for; and we understood that by what they then did it has followed that the degree of prosperity that we now enjoy has come to us.

There is something else connected with it. We have besides these men-descended by blood from our ancestors — among us perhaps half our people who are not descendants at all of these men, they are men who have come from Europe — German, Irish, French and Scandinavian — men that have come from Europe themselves, or whose ancestors have come hither and settled here, finding themselves our equals in all things.

If they look back through this history to trace their connection with those days by blood, they find they have none, they cannot carry themselves back into that glorious epoch and make themselves feel that they are part of us, but when they look through that old Declaration of Independence they find that those old men say that 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,' and then they feel that that moral sentiment taught in that day evidences their relation to those men, that it is the father of all moral principle in them, and that they have a right to claim it as through they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration, and so they are.

That is the electric cord in that Declaration that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together, that will link those patriotic hearts as long as the love of freedom exists in the minds of men throughout the world.”

That is the force that binds us to this land. That is the force that links me so strongly to Hillsdale. I prefaced my remarks by saying that I have no formal connection to Hillsdale – instead something much stronger binds us – a kindred spirit of devotion to these principles.

Now, it is altogether fitting that from time to time we remind ourselves that these principles are universal. We have hewed to them the longest and thus conquered the pinnacles of prosperity heretofore unknown to mankind. But history screams this chilling warning at us: abandon them and perish as a nation of free men. And I have to admit that watching these sacred principles embraced abroad at the same time as they appeared to wither in America has been rather unsettling, especially when they take root behind that old iron curtain.

My uncle is the only family member who stayed behind in the USSR. To this day, he lives in St. Petersburg, which Czar Peter the Great had the presence of mind to build on a swamp. The soil freezes in the winter and melts in the summer, rendering conventional building foundations structurally unfit. My uncle’s business lays a special type of foundation that allows buildings to be erected on this inhospitable terrain.

Several years ago, he worked on a project to bring the furniture store Ikea to St. Petersburg. The entire process to procure the necessary permits took ten days, at the conclusion of which the City held a reception in honor of my uncle’s company to thank them for bringing prosperity to St. Petersburg. To this day, he does not believe me when I attempt to assure him, quite seriously, that in California it would have taken him ten years, not ten days, to break ground on a new Ikea.

But I find optimism in this story. If the old Soviet Union can discover these principles in such short order, that indomitable American Spirit will restore them to the forefront of our public policy in very short order, as long as we continue our efforts to keep them at the forefront in the minds of our fellow Americans.

And that is where Hillsdale finds its role as a linchpin for the salvation of America. A Hillsdale professor didn’t teach me these principles, but because of your efforts, America has remained a bastion of freedom and I could yet learn them and draw inspiration from them for the fight for freedom that I watched my parents undertake.

The darkest danger that menaces this great nation is not a mighty army separating us from our land or our treasures; rather it is us separating from these principles.

We know every scene of the tragedy that invariably follows such separation. History has written it for us in plain form. But for as long as the efforts of Hillsdale College continue, know this: Congress may diverge from these principles; the President may detour around them in pursuit of his goals, but for as long as you continue your tireless efforts to inculcate them into the minds of the next generation, we cannot possibly deviate from our destiny to remain what Lincoln once called the last best hope of mankind.

That is a great speech. Just great.

It makes me ashamed to be an American, not because I am ashamed of myself (I am not!) but because I am ashamed of many of my fellow Americans, who take this gift we have, this freedom, and want to tear it up and destroy it.

The spoiled pieces of crap in New York "occupying" Wall Street have no idea what real poverty, real hunger and real oppression is. We have the best of all worlds in this country, and one of the main reasons we have these wonderful freedoms (apart from the founders who formed our Constitution and the men and women over the years who have died to preserve them) is because of the capitalist underpinnings that make the prosperity possible.

I was online recently, and came across a video that immediately came to mind when I read how Mr. Birman's uncle got permits for a new Ikea in ten days.

Ten days!

I saw this video: Russian youths play rock and roll traveling down a highway

This is a silly thing, but it made me realize that in some aspects, there is more freedom in the old Soviet Union than there is here!

I cannot believe I am saying that, but it is true. Watch the video, and look at these young, helmet-less men, driving a contraption of their own construction down a highway, playing loud rock and roll.

Is there anywhere, ANYWHERE in the USA that you could do that? Anywhere?

The answer is NO. You would be pulled over immediately, no helmet, no permit for the motorcycle, not buckled in, making a public disturbance and probably DAMNED SPEEDING.

Now, I understand the need for many regulations we see, but this nanny-statism has creeped up on us over the last four decades, and it is going to kill us.

They regulate how much water we can flush, how much energy our lightbulbs use and are on the way to seriously restricting what we can eat and drink. They are going to take away (already well on its way) to removing any kind of freedom of choice in health care.

I simply can't believe I am even saying this, but I think it is true. It galls me and shames me.

Yes, thank you calif_reaganite for posting this!

In the time we were active with the Tea Party in Erie County, NY (Buffalo), several times we heard from immigrants who were scared that they would again see the oppression they saw in the communist Europe they had left as young adults. These people were crying as they spoke - begging all who could hear them to continue the fight to return to America - the FREE.

A year ago, we moved to Texas where I have lived most of my life. Sad to see the corruption that has exploded in Dallas County in the last 8 years.

We ARE in the fight of our lives- all of us. It will be tough. We must spread this message.

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