Monday, November 03, 2008

What If I Don't Want You Improving My Life?

“Changing America.” “Improving the lives of Americans.” This would seem to be the flagship theme of this year’s Presidential election. Every candidate, Democrat or Republican, seems to have seized at least some splinter of this plank to fuel the fires at their respective campaign rallies. What’s frightening is that they actually seem to believe theirs is the right, power and ability to make improvements in your life and mine. What exactly did the Revolutionaries seek refuge from when they fought and died to expel the Crown from the Colonies? Did they do it simply to yield power to a new form of government that would likewise insert itself into their lives? I think not.

Getting inside the hearts and heads of our Founding Fathers is paramount to comprehending the essential nature of the Constitution they drafted, and what the Constitution is intended to do, and just as importantly, intended to avoid. Every U.S. citizen must have the understanding that the document the Founders labored over was not, and is not, a how-to manual for receiving and delegating power, nor is it a playbook for the disempowering of one’s political opposition. The Constitution of the United States, and the government it birthed, is the product of a group of people who knew first hand that a government must be intent on preserving the individual’s God-given rights to Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness, or become tyrannical. These men, and the citizenry and their posterity on whose behalf they labored, never again wanted to live under the yoke of monarchism or its offspring, tyranny. Prior to the drafting of the Declaration of Independence in 1776, and of the U.S. Constitution in 1787, sorrowful amounts of the blood of Colonists had been poured out in the endeavor to subdue and evict the Crown’s militia, so desperately did the colonists desire to be free of autocratic rule.

Before you vote this November, investing a bit of time in some eye-opening reading could cast a whole new light on the slate of candidates, and whether their goals are indeed worthy of the Constitution they will swear to uphold if elected.

First suggestion: Washington’s Crossing, by David Hackett Fischer. Fischer, an historian, draws heavily from preserved letters and diaries of soldiers of the Continental Army, of the British Army, as well as diaries of the mercenary forces (the Hessians) contracted by the King to help subdue the rebellious colonists. In this intimate revelation of our Revolutionary history we hear firsthand the privation and suffering and despair that at times overwhelmed Washington’s army - his men - to near dissolution at arguably the most critical juncture of the war. Consider the fortitude of these Continental soldiers clothed in threadbare garments, many even barefoot, as they traversed the iced banks of the Delaware River in the winter of 1776-77. In their wake they recorded upon the snow their own extraordinary signature to Freedom’s cause, inscribed with the blood that seeped from their frozen feet as they resolutely pressed on, ultimately, and thankfully, proving to be possessed of an indomitable spirit. Read this book carefully and as you read, consider the question, “What were these men fighting so desperately, and so passionately, for…or against?”


Secondly, read The 5,000 Year Leap, by W. Cleon Skousen. Like Fischer’s book, this text utilizes countless documents and personal correspondences written by various Founding Fathers, until piece by piece, in quilt-like fashion, we see the genius of the Constitution of the United States of America revealed.

Today it is far too common for U.S. citizens to point to the Constitution and make selfish declarations about ‘our rights’, and far too rare for us to give consideration to our selfless duty to defend the integrity of that Constitution, even if means personal sacrifice. Indeed the latter is today best understood, if not coveted, by those who wear the uniform of this nation’s military.

Read and contemplate. Before you mark your ballots this November, consider who you would most like to go about the business of ‘improving the lives of Americans’, i.e., of improving your life. Do you want the freedom to improve your life by whatever honorable means are at your disposal? Or would you leave that task, and the definition of ‘improvement’, to an elected official who knows not a single thing about you?