You know, I grew up in a Navy family. We lived from coast to coast. I was surrounded by other military kids most places I lived. Yeah, mostly white kids, but not all. I also rode a bus at one time where I was only one of a handful of white kids on the bus. Those were the days when the bus was filled as full as it could get. By the time we got to school every seat was filled and so was the aisle between them. Though that bus was packed with mostly chocolate brown skin, I wasn’t treated any different. In fact, since I was one of the youngest on the bus, many of those other kids kind of took care of me. I didn’t really notice a difference between us, maybe the way others spoke, the kinds of things that made them laugh, maybe the differences in the way we dressed, but those are things that make all kids different.
Those experiences really taught me that the only thing that mattered was the individual. I’ve kind of lived in a way that said, if you respect me, I’ll respect you. I’ve met people of all colors, persuasions, ethnicity. As an employee and then a manager, I learned everyone is different in some ways, but one thing everyone wanted was to be treated with dignity and respect.
One thing which makes us different is culture. It doesn’t matter if you grew up in Mexico, or the Appalachians; the plains of the Texas Panhandle or the heart of Jersey — culture, the people you grew up with, the food you ate, the festivities you celebrate, the church you grew up in, and the kids on your block, become part of your culture.
I’m kind of a mix of white European, Anglo-Saxon origin. My mom was from the Appalachians, a Hillbilly. Her family history goes back to England. My dad was French-Canadian, and goes back to Finland. Beyond that, I can’t say.
As a young man, I grew up loving this country. I had the full volume of the World Book Encyclopedia in my house at the age of six years old. I loved going through that thing and learning about things, especially history, and our country. Initially, I looked at the pictures. Then I learned to read it. I wrote reports on Presidents Lincoln and Kennedy in the third grade, largely using information I garnered by going through those books. In eighth grade we had civics, and I learned how our government and society was set up. I had black teachers and white teachers, men and women. I knew what the melting pot was all about – how out of different individuals, different cultures, different histories a nation of one was made.
I spent time in Virginia, the heart of our founding. I visited Williamsburg and Jamestown as a young boy. We took field trips to civil war battlefields. I spent time in Philadelphia and saw the Liberty Bell when I was about six or seven years old. In Virginia, we studied Virginia history in the second grade. I knew about the Founders and even then I realized we had something unique here in this country. I grew up saying the Pledge of Allegiance every morning before we started our school day. Through grade school, high school, and college, I had state history, US history, and World History.
There’s been a lot of hindsight over the past few years. You know what they say about hindsight — its 20/20. There is a reason they say that. Things look different in the moment. Aw, when I look back over my life, there’s lots of things I’d do different if I had the knowledge then that I have now. Not, necessarily to change the course of my life, but things I feel I could have made a better choice on. But those mistakes, they became part of me and made me who I am.
Despite their flaws, we were given a gift from God through a group of imperfect people. Yes, for a long time the average American learned to revere our Founders, lifting them up atop a pedestal, treating them as if they never made a mistake. Historians always knew, there were flaws, slavery being one of the biggest blights on some of them, and our nation. Novels, biographies, and documentaries were made throughout history that documented their lives, and broke out the truths, but still, to the public, to the student, we had a tendency to treat them as if they were unbroken, perfect.
Shit, they were just men. Living in a time – living in a flawed time. Just like us. Even the people today who have tried to vilify them, are living in a time – flawed people living in a flawed time. And history will one day judge these people, what will it say about them?
Yet, these flawed men – men who weren’t perfect, somehow came up with a system of government, which surpassed all the governments on earth. Not a democracy, because democracy is mass rule. People, if you ever studied Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, and read Mark Antony’s speech, you understand that people become stupid as a mass. Mass rule is bad. Mass rule discards the mind of the minority. It trounces upon the liberty of the individual. It rolls over your rights in the name of group think.
So, these flawed men, gave us a Republic, if we could keep it. A system of government which is run by the people, but maintains liberty and individual rights by the protection of a Constitution. This document – a crinkled, yellowed paper – protects us from the very government which we chose. Its intent was to establish rules for government which do not impede, remove, or trample the rights of the individual, and which allows us to operate as a group of people. Their vision was for Federal Power to be limited by this document, and all rights not expressly given to that Federal government to remain in the hands of State Government, which was, of course, closest to the people.
However, somewhere in our history, this idea was subverted. Certain people wanted to center power in their own hands, taking away the power of the people. They slowly erased, pulled at the strings, stole, and eroded the intent, of these flawed, but blessed men, building Washington DC into a hammer with the strength of Mjollnir. They opened Pandora’s Box, and as much as they try to control it, they cannot. It will be our and their demise. They did what wasn’t meant to be done. They removed the cornerstone, and the building has begun to crumble.
They took away state’s rights, the people’s rights. They said we all have to be stamped into the same form. And the only form they could come up with was the form of weakness.
Example: 68% of Americans are supportive of immigration. Most of us realize that we ALL come from some immigrant status. I know, I know, except for the natives you say. I say, go back in history. Natives immigrated as well. They just did it before the rest of us. They came across a land bridge between 30,000 -12,000 years ago (or so history says). But we are a country of laws, rules, which help us govern our society. We largely agree that immigration is a good thing, but illegal immigration is a bad thing. In fact, 55% of US adults say that illegal immigration is a critical issue in the country. Its not that we don’t want people, we just want them to follow the rules. And yes, the rules need attention. The process our government has set up for immigration is broken, but we don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. We enforce the rules, and then we try to fix the rules.
But this wouldn’t help the agenda. The agenda is to bring this nation in line with other nations. To create a global nation, erase the sovereignty of individual nations, make no nation better than another. Weaken Europe and the America’s, and make them no different than anywhere else. With legal immigration, we stay a melting pot. We welcome others into our society, but we remain a society of a collective people. We assimilate others into us. We are still people of different cultures, histories, and backgrounds, yet we are a people of one nation, with the same ideals, which are set up in that crinkled, yellow paper. Illegal immigration sets up separate societies, people who never really become part of us, Americans.
Here’s another example of how the foundation is beginning to crumble. We are now trying to erase history. We are removing monuments, statues, anything which could be an awful reminder of our past. But we are who we are because of the past. You are you, with your mistakes, your errors, your wrong turns, your corrections, your redirects, your learned experience. Without those things, you would not be who you are right now. A nation is no different. Context is fine. Looking back honestly on our mistakes keeps us headed in the right direction, but removing what brought us here, doesn’t change the past. History forgotten is history repeated.
You want another example? There has been a lot of twisting of this idea of church and state over the years. Our constitution – remember is a protective document. It limits Federal Government, giving all other powers not directly assigned by it back to the states to decide. There is no “wall,” no separation of church and state in the constitution.
The First Amendment of the Constitution says:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or
prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of
speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to
assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Many of our founders came here because they wanted religious liberty. In England, they had the Church of England. They wanted to worship differently. They set up our constitution to prevent the Federal Government from founding, insisting, demanding, or establishing a National Church, and keeps if from prohibiting any form of worship or religion. Because it does not control religion, that power belongs to the state or to the people as individuals. In fact, a state could have its own church, established by the people. Ever wonder why Pennsylvania is called the Quaker State? Because William Penn and other Quakers established it.
The wall of separation is largely contributed to Thomas Jefferson, where he mentions this idea. However, the document in which it was mentioned is a letter to the Danbury Baptist Association. His point was that there was a wall of separation from Government toward religion, not the other way around. He says:
“Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should “make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.”
His statement and sentiments are exactly in line with our constitution. This does not mean, one’s religious beliefs cannot have impact upon government, but that government cannot have impact upon religion. Yet, we have abandoned this principle because some believe we should wall off and whitewash our government from any moral, or religious belief. George Washington said in his farewell address:
“Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports.”
Again, indicating that religious and moral influence within government or the nation as a whole, is “indispensable.” In fact, George Washington, in this farewell address to the nation, offered several warnings to his foundling nation, warnings which have not been heeded. If you care to read them, you can find them here. And if you read them, you will see why we are beginning to crumble. Controlling national debt, care towards dividing into political parties, avoiding foreign entanglements and encumbering alliances, remaining rigid in support of the constitution, and being united as a country are just some of the warnings our first president offered 228 years ago.
One last tug at the cornerstone. Lincoln said, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”
