Like Pictures in a Museum

Have you ever wondered why the more things change the more they stay the same? Why after all of your hard work and pleading on your knees for things to change they don't? I have asked myself those same questions after almost every election where the candidates that I have supported have failed to win. This time I am backing off of the emotional backlash that I usually rely on as I felt the hurricane force of someone laying into me because of my personal and political views and so will not spew more vitriol into the current climate. What I came to realize is that it really is up to me to do something. No wailing and crying and gnashing of teeth will ever move the voters one iota. With only 23% of registered voters in the state taking the time to cast their ballot, it appears that they are too busy watching Lady Gaga on YouTube (over 300,000,000 views) to get off their collective *s to take part in what well could be the last battle for freedom and liberty in this nation.

So for me I will continue to fight the good fight, preserve the principles of the Founders, and look to November as the next battle in the war for Freedom. When David Letterman asked "Who do they want to take the country back from?" I thought of Pilate's famous line "What is Truth?"
Now wanting Freedom from an oppressive federal government, the New American Plantation, where all your needs womb (if you make it out alive) to tomb are taken care of as long as you give your allegiance to the slave daddies in Big Government, is considered a radical stance, un-American, unpatriotic. Letterman is representative of the New Aristocracy where a subhuman can earn over $20 million a year by pushing the company line. "If you're a good boy, Dave, you can have Barry join you on the set and we will see to it that those pesky sexual harassment charges disappear."

So will it be that the very idea of a Republic disappears and the only remnant of it is a series of portraits hung in some dusty museum where few ever go as it is so passe?

As for me, this day, I choose Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. What do you choose?

Revolution 2.0

The more things change, the more they remain... insane.

Michael Fry and T. Lewis, Over the Hedge, 05-09-04

WE are 233 years into the world’s oldest experiment with freedom based on individual rights—not the rights of kings, or generals, or gods. And yet those who have benefited the most from this Republic are the very ones who cry loudly for rights not for individuals but for groups. Our system of government emerged from the belief that mankind are created in the image of God, the one God embraced by our ancestors who unashamedly declared that each one of us is endowed, that’s right, “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Through a lengthy series of legislative slight of hands, the individual has been superseded by special interest groups. But, I wonder, who assigns you to a group? Who or what bureaucracy is the labeler-in-chief that lets each of us know that we have no meaning or purpose in life unless we can be seen as a member of a protected class?

History is a cruel teacher as it points out what results from certain choices. Centuries of tyranny cannot hide from the historian’s eye. So it is no wonder that it is critical to decouple the current generation from that record if one wants to embrace a new age of tyranny. Fools who have made of themselves gods believe that with their superior intellect and communication techniques they can wash away the historical records with a little rewrite here and little deletion there. In that fantasy world, tyrants can be redressed in the new clothes of progressivism. Even Hitler can be redrawn as a conservative Christian in their eyes in order to avoid seeing the similar roots of Nazism and the progressive “empathy” they profess.

So in case you missed it, here is a little “change” history. If you do not realize that July 4^th is a tribute to the American Revolution that has given you your current world, you may not know what caused regular folks to rise up and challenge a government knowing full well they could lose their lives, fortunes and sacred honors. So what caused that first Tea Party? Much of what we are experiencing today.

Current circumstances in our country and its leadership are reminiscent of themes, emotions, and challenges leading to the American Revolution. Unless you're a history buff, you may not know that the original revolution was eerily similar to what we're going through at this moment, down to the roots. According Gordon S. Wood, a professor at Brown University, it was the economy, stupid. Adding intrigue is the fact that it wasn't just the economy, but SPECIFICALLY A HOUSING BUBBLE that made the American Revolution unfold the way that it did.

In an article that appeared in the New York Times:

For the colonists, as for us, first came the boom. During the height of the French and Indian War, which lasted from 1754 until 1763, money flooded into the colonies, especially New York, where the British Army was headquartered. At the same time, the New York Legislature issued large numbers of bills of credit.

All that cash sloshing around resulted in lavish displays of wealth— notably by British officers, who’s opulent living, was emulated by the locals, especially in New York.

Housing prices soared during the war. But when credit tightened afterward — thanks in no small part to a prohibition on the issuance of paper money by the colonies under the Currency Act of 1764 — real estate owners who could not pay their debts lost their land.

In that era, the citizens demanded accountability from their leaders. Instead of having their grievances addressed, they were taxed more on items that they depended upon for daily life and commerce. The tax that broke the apathy of the colonists was the tea tax, thus the Boston Tea Party. (No Janeane, it wasn’t about discrimination!) What they objected to the most, was the disregard for the individual. No matter their status, they were all placed in the group called colonists. And as such were subjects of the Crown. This led to the organizing document of this country, the Declaration of Independence. In the body of that document, the plaintive established a legal case for separation. “The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States.”

The eerie similarities to today have many of the same ingredients, but the most egregious is the failure to uphold individual freedom. As the dominoes for the “remaking of America” continue to be put in place by the ideologue-in-chief along with the creation of a non-elected group of czars who hold allegiance only to him, it is important to dust off our founding documents, re-read them along with Common Sense and The Federalist Papers, make your signs, attend a local Tea Party and fax without ceasing.