"Little by Little the Progressives
Whittle"
from "In Defense of
Rural America"
By Ron Ewart,
President
National Association of Rural Landowners (www.narlo.org)
Just about everyone is born with sight, but when
they grow up, very few gain vision. Vision is the capability to take all that
you know and project what might happen in the future, then base your actions on
that prediction. Often times, the more you know the greater the possibility of
an accurate prediction. Vision comes from reviewing the past, analyzing the
present and using that knowledge to forecast the future. Even with all this
knowledge, forecasting the future, just like predicting the weather or global
warming, can be very difficult and sometimes borders on flipping a coin. Still,
many try, but many more are wrong. They are wrong because the system they are
trying to predict is a non-linear dynamic system and any small tweaking can
produce huge differences in direction. Even small changes in one or more
variables can render a prediction instantly irrelevant.
Say we want to look forward 100 years and guess
what the conditions will be like then? One attempt is to go back 100 years and
see where we have come. But instead, we are going to go back 230 years. The
Founding Fathers looked back at 150 years of British colonial rule from roughly
1620 to 1770 and made their own predictions. British rule was gaining in
excessive abuses, like all governments do over time, and the Founders tried to
divine the future by establishing a set of rules (our constitution) that
free men could live by, that required dissolving their relationship with their
homeland, a bold, dangerous and courageous move on their part. The basic
principle of these new rules was that as an individual, you have certain
unalienable rights, but with those rights come individual responsibility. The
general rule was ".....you take care of your life and government will stay
out of your way." But today, 230 years later, it is
now "government will take care of you and you had better not get in their
way." This is a vastly different approach to our
original designs on freedom and individual liberty. Hardly what the Founding
Fathers had in mind.
But just like the fish that is enticed by the
bait and makes the mistake of trying to eat the camouflaged hook, the people of
America have taken the bait and the "hook" is slavery. The government has been
directly complicit in putting out the "bait" and has purposely played on the
human weaknesses of greed, laziness and apathy in order to assume greater
power. Whom can we blame but ourselves, because we let them do it.
So what does the next 100 years bring? That
depends on two things.
1. Can the people who are aware of the direction we are
going have the will, the courage and the numbers to do what it takes to change
that direction back towards freedom?
2. Or will the growing number of people who
have taken the "bait" because of their greed, laziness and apathy, deliver us
into the hands of the devil and abject slavery? If one were to analyze the
current direction without a course correction, slavery is our future. But only
time will tell, as any prediction is difficult to make, because the behavior of
people and the events that motivate them over long periods of time, are
extremely difficult to determine with any accuracy, just like global
warming.
In 1776 could anyone have predicted that the
colonials would defeat England? Everything was stacked against them and it was
touch and go until close to the very end. It is still touch and go today, but
the enemy is not our old homeland or a foreign country. The enemy is our own
human weakness that seeks the easy path; that seeks security over liberty; that
seeks a free "lunch" naively thinking that the "lunch" is actually free. The
path to freedom was very hard and won at great cost. The path to preserve
freedom will be equally hard and the cost will be high.
For our predictions for the future we will look
back at the last 100 or so years since the Progressive movement started in the
early 19 hundreds. From the
16th Amendment, through FDR’s New Deal and social security, to President
Johnson’s War on Poverty, to welfare, Medicaid, Medicare and now Obama Care, the
Progressives have been whittling away at the "stick" of American freedom. They
have bastardized the sanctity of life, marriage, our bathrooms, guns, the
environment, our money and the defense against our enemies, foreign and
domestic. They have taken over our land, our water, our food, our energy and our
health care.
They continue to minimize the Islamic
threat and refuse to acknowledge the religious component. The horrific attack in
Orlando last night proves that we are at war with radical Islam while the Obama
Administration and Democrats downplay the imminent danger. The blood spilled in
San Bernardino and Orlando is on Obama’s hands.
Progressives have attacked our Judeo-Christian
heritage and they are constantly whittling away at the Second Amendment. In a
recent ruling by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, the most liberal court in the
land, the full court "used shameful sophistry and sleight of hand to
effectively deny millions of Californians their constitutional right to bear
firearms in public for self-defense. The ruling came in the long-running case of
Peruta v. San
Diego, which
challenged California’s discretionary issuance of concealed carry permits, the
only option Californians have to legally exercise this right. Ignoring that
fact, the court held that concealed carry of firearms in public is not protected
by the Second Amendment and the use of discretionary permitting practices does
not offend that provision." (source of quote:
California Rifle and Pistol Association
CRPA)
This decision will obviously end up in the U. S.
Supreme Court where the court will once again have to define the limits, if any,
on the Second Amendment. The makeup of the high court at the time, will
determine whether the decision of the 9th Circuit will be overturned, or upheld.
With the court teetering at a 4-to-4 condition, which president nominates the
next Supreme Court Justice could very well seal the fate of the Second Amendment
once and for all. That’s how important this election has become.
Both nominees for president are seriously flawed, in many more ways than we can outline here. But which president will nominate a specific flavor of a Supreme Court justice is already pre-determined. Clinton will add to the liberal side of the court and Trump is more likely to add to the conservative side. So many of our rights have been destroyed by the decisions of a liberal court. A conservative court has upheld many more of our rights. Americans must decide whether they want to live "in the land of the free and the home of the brave, or the land of the slave and the home of the free …. meal." History has shown that the Progressives will give us the latter and Conservatives are more apt to give us the former.
Donald Trump is no doubt a flawed candidate for
president. His negatives are higher than his positives. Nevertheless, his
positives appear to be good for a free, prosperous and a strong America, which
is what every American should want.
For the last 100 plus years the Progressives
have been whittling away at our individual, unalienable rights, bringing us to a
nation of the collective rather than the individual, in direct
opposition to and in direct conflict with the intent of the Founding
Fathers, not to mention the U. S. Constitution. If the Progressives are given
the presidency for one more term, just one, not two, the nation may never
recover to become the free nation that upholds freedom in America and the
stability of the entire world.
Over 150 years ago then Senator Daniel Webster
said: "Miracles do not cluster.
Hold on to the Constitution of the United States of America and the Republic for
which it stands -- what has happened once in six thousand years may never happen
again. Hold on to your Constitution, for if the American Constitution shall fail
there will be anarchy throughout the world."
Senator Webster's admonition is more right
today than it was 150 years ago.
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NOTE: The foregoing
article represents the opinion of the author and is not necessarily shared by
the owners, representatives, employees, or agents of the
publisher.
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Ron Ewart, a nationally known author and
speaker on freedom and property rights issues and author of this weekly column,
"In Defense of Rural America", is the president of the National
Association of Rural Landowners (NARLO) (http://www.narlo.org) an advocate and consultant for urban
and rural landowners and a non-profit corporation headquartered in
Washington State. He can be reached for comment at: info@narlo.org.
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