Sunday, November 2, 2014

"GIVE ME LIBERTY OR GIVE ME DEATH"


"Without Liberty, We Might As Well Be Dead"
from "In Defense of Rural America"
By Ron Ewart, President of the

National Association of Rural Landowners
and nationally recognized author and speaker on freedom and property rights issues
Ó Copyright Sunday, November 2, 2014 - All Rights Reserved
 
(This is a revsion to an article we wrote in October of 2008, just before Obama was elected to his first term)
 
 
As published on Newswithviews, October 29, 2014
 
 
This article is also available on our website at:
 
 
PROLOGUE: In a couple of days Americans who care about their freedom will be faced with one of the most important choices they will ever make since the American Revolution. If you sit out this election, the other side will win. If you vote for a third party candidate, the other side will win. If you write in a candidate, the other side will win. Conservatives are by no means perfect and are at best, the lesser of two evils. But at least they generally believe in the founding principles of freedom. Conservatives believe in individual, unalienable rights as the gift from their creator. The other side believes in the collective and the absolute rule of the majority ….. the mob. The following story will give you an idea where America is headed, unless conservatives like you come out en masse on November 4th and relegate the other side to obscurity.
 
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"In the shackle room of the jailhouse, the jailer snaps the handcuffs around your wrists and attaches them to the chain around your waste.  You tremble in anticipation of what comes next.  The jailer then reaches for the leg irons, and one by one, closes them tightly around your ankles.  Your anxiety rises even further.  All through this process, you keep telling the jailer that you are innocent.  Paying no attention to your pleadings, the jailer impersonally grabs you by the arm and pulls you out the door.  You struggle to walk because the chain connecting the leg irons is very short, forcing you to shuffle.  The people in the hallway and on the walkway outside stare at you with disdain in their eyes, but you can't see the dread in their hearts.  Paralyzing fear grips you as you approach the steps to the gallows.  You balk at the bottom of the stairs but the jailer pulls on you harder, making you stumble up the stairs."
"At the top of the stairs, the jailer walks you over to a trap door and tells you to stand there.  He pulls a black hood over your head and then roughly places the thick hangman's noose around your neck and pulls it tight.  You are now blind and more than just afraid.  You are terrified.  Each beat of your rapidly-beating heart reverberates in your head like a loud drum. You contemplate your last few minutes on Earth and visions of your whole life parade in a kaleidoscope of images in your mind.    In pure anguish, you think of what will happen to your wife and kids when you are gone.  You let out a soft moan at the thought."
"How is it you find yourself in this situation, when all you had done was to speak out against the government?  How did a once-free society find itself in a police state where every single unalienable right had been stripped from the people, one Amendment at a time?  What happened to freedom, liberty and justice, the pursuit of happiness and the promise of our sacred Constitution?  Was this Cuba or Red China?  You say to yourself, '..... what happened to my individual rights?  Why didn't someone fight for them?'"
"As you finally accept your fate, you flinch as the jailer whispers something in your ear through the hood, but you can't believe what he is saying.  He said he had been given the authority to grant clemency and that all I would have to do to be saved from the gallows was to denounce freedom and liberty.  Nevertheless, I would still have to wear the handcuffs and leg irons whenever I was outside my cell, for the rest of my life.  Knowing full well what the consequences of my next act would be, I rose up tall, took a deep breath and through the hood, told the jailer that without liberty, I might as well be dead.  And then I said, in almost a scream, "Give Me Liberty, Or Give Me Death." 
"To my utter surprise, the crowd around the gallows, who, in the beginning, looked on me with disgust, started to repeat my statement, chanting it over and over again.  And each time their voices grew louder and louder.  In an act of pure solidarity, somehow triggered by what I said, they rushed the gallows, tore the guns from the guards and stopped the jailer as he was reaching for the lever that would open the trap door.  I had been saved.  I had been saved by an idea.  I had been saved by a concept that is as old as civilization itself.  I had been saved by the irresistible siren call of freedom."
"A few in the crowd removed the noose around my neck, lifted the hood off my head and then unlocked my shackles and chains.  They led me down off the gallows platform and lifted me up on their shoulders like a hero and marched me through the streets, as a sign of protest to the authorities.  I was free at last and free because I took a stand against tyranny, even though it could have meant my death. The people who witnessed this injustice finally realized that they would also have to take a stand to protect their own freedom, if liberty was to prevail for each of them and future generations."
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Yes, of course, the foregoing was fiction but don't think it can't happen in America. The story illustrates what can happen in a country when the leaders are free to do anything they want to do, because the people refused to hold the leaders accountable. 
But most people, faced with the choice of slavery or freedom, will eventually seek freedom.  Americans tore themselves away from the tyranny of England, at great cost.  From that conflict arose the most powerful nation on Earth, conceived in liberty; a nation built on the recognition of the inviolate natural rights of man, but an idea that has been left to rust in the history books....... for now.
If there were only a way for the cry, "Give Me Liberty, Or Give Me Death" to infect every man, woman and child in America and get them to rise up and storm the "gallows of politics and politicians" and tear that "gallows" down with the same vigor and determination that President Reagan told Russia's Gorbechev to "Tear Down This Wall."  And this they must do before no man is safe from persecution for speaking out against a government, a government that is Hell bent on the systematic destruction of a free society.  
If comfort and security are more important than freedom and liberty, then we give our consent to be enslaved.  If being entertained is more important than taking an active interest in what our leaders have done and are doing, we deserve whatever those leaders inflict upon us.  Should we turn our heads away from our duty to preserve, protect and defend the constitution of the United States and the freedom and liberty it guarantees, we perpetrate a grave injustice on ourselves and on our children and grandchildren.
Americans have three choices, if freedom and liberty are to be preserved; 1) replace the current leaders with new ones that will respect and defend the Constitution; or 2) in a wholesale, massive act of solidarity, protest in the spirit of a national Boston Tea Party and take away the "fuel", our money, that "funds" those leaders who violate their oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution; or lastly, 3) be prepared for a bloody civil war or revolution.  The third choice is fraught with uncertainty and is the least likely to succeed.
Most of the other side's current slate of mid-term candidates are clueless as to what America really is and for what it stands. Most of the local, state and federal legislators continue to lead us into financial oblivion and abject slavery, based on premises and policies far removed from the mandates of our constitution.  We must ask why it is, throughout our entire civilized history, we find it necessary to always have to rest control from our leaders by force, who eventually go out of control?  Will we never learn from history, that the price of liberty still is and always will be, eternal vigilance?   We are 315,000,000 strong but are irreparably weakened by irrational division.  We either come together and agree on sound economic and political principles, or we will disintegrate into chaos and servitude.  The bottomless canyon we are about to fall into is just over the next hill and there will be no rescue attempts, should we fall.
Before it is too late, we need to hear once again, all across this once-great land of ours, the rallying cry of our early ancestors that won our freedom at such a huge sacrifice; "Give Me Liberty, or Give Me Death."  But those carrying this torch and making this cry must know in detail, just what liberty really means.  What the Founding Fathers laid out for us in our Constitution was indeed, the design, or blueprint if you will, for individual liberty.  (No it is not perfect) However, what we have in America today is nothing more than a socialist collective. It is the antithesis of liberty.   We have let the powerful, the ideologues and the educated idiots take over this country, with the help of a government that funds and supports them.  If we want to take back this country and restore it to a Constitutional Republic, conservatives are going to have to fight for it and not just at the voting booth.
Never have so many been so complicit in their own demise.  Never has so many been so ignorant of the evil that lurks in the hearts of men of wealth, influence and power, when left to their own resources and without being held accountable for their actions by the people.  Never have so many been so guilty of thinking that they can get something for free without paying a price.  And the price they pay is their own enslavement.  As was said several times in the movie "Forrest Gump", "Stupid is As Stupid Does".  The question is, will the history books write America's  epitaph with, "here lies the remains of a once-free, powerful nation, that died a wrenching death because of just plain stupidity?"
If you don't consider yourself stupid and agree with our assessment, make the mid-term elections a rallying cry for "Give Me Liberty, Or Give Me Death." Let all of America hear from you so that conservatives don't feel like the only thing they hear is the sound of their own voices echoing back to them from the walls of an empty canyon.  If you don't want to see America die a slow, painful death, then let's build a conservative army to save it with only one thing in their minds, "Give Me Liberty, Or Give Me Death." 
America is infected with several cancers; the cancers of abuse of power, corruption, greed and stupidity.  Let's cut out these cancers with good old American courage and intellect.  For the last 10 years we have been on the cutting edge of confronting those cancers with our weekly column and the highly informative
NARLO
website. Throughout those 10 years we have come to the conclusion that most people are willing to give lip service to confronting government, but aren't willing to put their feet in the "water". Killing a cancer requires painful, aggressive action wherein the cure almost kills the "body" before it eradicates the cancer. This is America's reality. This is where we are and where will stay without painful, aggressive action by those who know what must be done.
 
 
NOTE: The foregoing article represents the opinion of the author and is not necessarily shared by the owners, employees, representatives, 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), a non-profit corporation headquartered in Washington State, an advocate and consultant for urban and rural landowners.  He can be reached for comment at info@narlo.org.

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