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Posted on 07/07/2003 11:55:58 AM PDT by truthandlife
Wow! 227 years old! Happy Fourth of July! Happy Birthday USA!
It seems only yesterday we were celebrating the bicentennial. And look at that ... it's 27 years later. My, my, what have we wrought?
Let's see, if I remember the words of Tennessee Ernie Ford's hit song "Sixteen Tons": "You load 16 tons and what do you get? A little bit older and deeper in debt."
Yeah. That about nails it. We're older, we're deeper in debt on every level of government and – judging by the news of the last couple of weeks, what a load! And we're under it, if you get my drift.
With all the celebrations on the Fourth and the holiday weekend, I'll bet almost no one really considered what we were supposed to be celebrating. I'll bet almost no one really considered where we are today in this country. And, I'll bet almost no one really considered how low on the totem pole the average citizen is in this country today.
The Fourth of July is our birthday. It is our independence day, when we celebrate our freedom. That's a big word.
It means our freedom from foreign domination. The Declaration of Independence put that in plain words.
It means freedom for our country to grow and change and yet maintain the solid foundation provided by the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
How many people read either one of those documents on the Fourth? How many people even read a few words from them? I'd wager almost none did. And that's a shame.
What always strikes me about the Declaration of Independence is that the reasons for getting out from under the domination of King George haven't really gone away. In fact, the complaints against the Crown sound remarkably like the complaints against our own government today.
As for the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, just scan the headlines and red flags should go up at almost every turn.
Loss of states' rights – think Supreme Court rulings.
Loss of equal protection under the law – think Supreme Court rulings, where some are more equal than others.
Loss of individual rights and dignity as the government decides who needs what and takes money from some to distribute to others.
Loss of local control – think power of private environmental organizations to coerce government to make laws affecting community development and land use, think regional government, think strings on federal money, think federal control of education and these are just a few.
Loss of property rights – think of use of eminent domain to make property useless and steal it from owners for government use and profit.
Use of taxes as punishment – think tobacco taxes, rationalized by government to force behavior change as well as automotive taxes and tolls to attempt to force people out of their cars, the result of pressure from environmental groups.
Entanglements in international treaties and foreign interventions – the list grows longer each day from Haiti and Bosnia and Kuwait to Afghanistan, Iraq now Liberia – there are more.
Relinquishment of our sovereign rights, regardless of how gradually, to international control – consider first the U.N. but intertwined within are all the varied health, environmental, legal and military demands on the U.S.
Ultimately, consider the shift of power to the federal government from local to county to regional to state and then to Washington and consider the gradual, yet real, shift of national sovereignty to world governance.
Forgotten in all of this is the American citizen, besieged on all sides by governmental demands and edicts and forced to fork over the money to pay for it all. That's the load we're under!
At heart, Americans do appreciate what we have and what we should protect. The immediate reaction to 9-11 showed that. The danger lies in the fact we're so busy trying to maintain ourselves to meet the demands of government that we don't see what we're losing.
It's a dangerous situation and one we must soon face.
Sometimes I feel as though the Fourth of July celebration is like an Irish wake where the people are mourning a loss but do it with a wingding celebration to hide the grief.
I think the truth is most people take our country and our freedom for granted and believe it will always be there.
And that, my friends, is what makes the situation so terribly dangerous, because it's exactly what our enemies want.
And it has been so gradual that most can't or won't see it.
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