Sometimes reality emphasizes ideas from the past. I wrote this essay 10 years ago this week and when I came across it last week, I just had to share it for my blog this week. In some ways it’s really kind of scary because of how far we have gone backwards in 10 years. And how many things are still the same, and not in a positive way. What do you think?
Originally published on August 9, 2016-
“Let each citizen remember at the moment he is offering his vote…that he is executing one of the most solemn trusts in human society for which he is accountable to God and his country.” Samuel Adams, April 16, 1781
As we’re watching this election cycle really start to heat up, I believe a big part of the problem is how We The People have become so focused on “labels”. Being able to “define” who and what any candidate “is” I guess has value in the grand scheme of things. But “I’m a Conservative”, or “I’m a Constitutional Conservative” or “I’m a Liberty candidate” or “I’m a Libertarian”, or “I’m a Liberal”, or “I’m a Progressive”, or heck, even “I’m a Communist” or “I’m a Socialist” has just become basically irrelevant to the real picture. I’ve reached the point where in our political arena there is only one label that really matters, or at least really should matter, the “US Citizen”. And who is willing to accept defending EVERY US Citizen is, as an elected official, their most important obligation?
This is where we believe the divide is illustrated in the different philosophies of the two major political parties, or at least used to be. On one hand we had the Democratic Party, which has existed, and sadly grown, through dividing the various “groups” of the American People and buying their votes with carve outs for this group or that group from the government largesse. They have the basic belief that “Government knows best”. And then we have the Republican Party, which had existed through the promotion of less government and more Liberty for the People. Sadly, we have reached a place where at the national government level, you really no longer see much difference between the two. Why? Because both of these national political machines now are only driven by which one can out-bid the other to buy votes because the only thing that matters to them is keeping their seats at “the table”.
The thing that nobody, particularly the national government “power brokers”, seems to want to talk about is who has become the victim of this whole “transformation”? It’s really very easy to see if we just open our eyes and look beyond the political Kabuki Theater, and open our ears and listen beyond the noise. The REAL victim of all of this has been the US Citizen. And it’s not just the US Citizen, but also the actual value of their Citizenship. Since Ronald Reagan left office, the national government has been increasingly devaluing US Citizenship. The thing I find to be amazing, and incredibly disappointing, is that the national government game players seem to see there is less value in US Citizenship, and the US Citizens who elect them, than do the people all around the world, who dream of acquiring it one day. This is undermining the foundation of our Country, or Culture and our Society.
As we now watch the Presidential Pageant unfold, we are seeing it develop in to a contest between two distinctly different ideas of who we are, and will be, going forward. You have former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton who is running for the next term of the “President of the World”. Then you have Donald J Trump who is running to be the President of the United States, whose focus is on the prosperity of the US Citizen. We believe this is the fundamental difference between the two people and the two philosophies in this race. Anyone who is paying attention can see that if the United States continues marching to the Globalism drumbeat, it will be disastrous to the average US Citizen. It’s time we demand our elected officials make defending the US Citizen Job 1!
