A friend read the first article I wrote on this topic and commented he hoped I would make it a series. I think I might give it a shot because many Americans have no idea of how our greatness was made possible, and why it is now being denigrated… especially those we call millennials. Most readers will probably already have identified me as a senior citizen. I won’t tell you just how senior I am but the automobile had already been invented when I arrived. Nobody on our block owned one. You will have to forgive me if I sometimes seem to be repeating myself. Often that is the only way to clarify some new information. Many books have been written covering our topic and I will be referencing some of them. I will do my best to identify them with footnotes if not in the text itself. At this early point I offer this quote from W. Cleon Skousen’s “The Making of America.”
“This book is about the world’s greatest political success formula. In a little over a century, this formula allowed a small segment of the human family – less than 6 percent – to become the richest industrial nation on earth. It allowed them to originate more than half of the world’s total production and enjoy the highest standard of living in the history of the world.
“It also produced a very generous people. No nation in all the recorded annals of the past has shared so much of its wealth with every other nation as has the United States of America. Even when it loaned money, it often forgave the debt.”
If you listen to the critics in Washington these days you must assume history has rewritten itself.
Most every American today knows we have a Constitution our forefathers signed way back in seventeen hundred and something that got our colonies joined together to form our national government. That’s about all a large percentage of the citizenry knows or wants to know. That citizenry votes every couple of years to elect Congressmen/Congresswomen to make our laws and to support that Constitution, which many of them have never read. The story goes that when the Constitution was finally signed a lady asked Benjamin Franklin (one of the signers) what kind of government they had given us. Franklin is said to have replied, “A Republic, madam, if you can keep it.” Ask virtually any Congress person today what kind of government do we have? If they don’t say “a Democracy” I’ll buy you a steak dinner. I suspect ninety-nine percent of citizens would give the same answer. The Constitution our founders gave us was the first ever of its kind. It gave us a Republic to be controlled by the citizenry. “We-The- People” elect the leaders who make the laws that govern our nation. If we don’t like the laws they give us we can vote them out of office in the next election. Only most of us don’t seem to be paying attention to the laws they are making because we keep electing the same swamp-critters. Our Constitution also gives us the Electoral College system of voting for the President, ensuring that every state has a say in the presidential election. Many in our current Congress would like to change that, so that two or three large states could control the presidency.
The question most people ask in situations like this is: what’s the difference between a Republic and a Democracy. I offer the following: Democracy vs. Republic. ... In a republic, a constitution or charter of rights protects certain unalienable1 rights that cannot be taken away by the government, even if it has been elected by a majority of voters. In a "pure democracy," the majority is not restrained in this way and can impose its will on the minority.
The comment by Ben Franklin (above) is evidence that some of the signers of the Constitution were concerned about the peoples’ willingness or ability to maintain a watch on their elected officials to ensure they followed the Constitution. The condition we find in Washington today is evidence those concerns had merit. Our Constitution, along with its amendments, gives the Federal Government very limited control over the people occupying the States, but over the years Congress and the Judiciary have found loopholes to broaden their authorities, and the people have been ‘educated’ to accept such decisions. Today’s Washington didn’t just happen overnight, it was well organized and implemented gradually over the decades. We were also ‘educated’ to think; well, I can’t do anything about it. The recent development of the Tea Party and the entrance of Trump onto the scene is evidence that maybe we can do something about it. It will take effort, it will take courage and it will take perseverance. We have a leader in Trump, we may not like everything he does, but I can’t envision another such leader on the horizon.
When I was a youngster everyone I knew was a Christian and most were church-goers. Our schools always had devotionals and prayer was commonplace. We had corner grocery stores and people said; just put it on my bill. The neighbors all knew each other and nobody felt they had to lock the door when they left the house. The bus stop was two or three blocks away and it cost a nickel to ride to town. Most of the kids walked because it was faster than waiting for the bus and a nickel was popcorn. There was no such thing as television and not everybody had a radio. If you had a telephone it was probably a party-line. I just threw this paragraph in so you could compare my then-and-now. I’ve watched a lot of changes and they haven’t all been good, but I never thought I’d see the day ‘Christian’ would be a bad word in America.
If you really want to look for the greatness in this country, you have to learn to see the good from the bad, and when you start taking out the good you can bet the bad will follow. It will really go downhill when leaders start calling good bad and bad good, which is happening quite a lot in the Washington arena and a few other places, like major Media and Hollywood.
Next time we’ll take a closer look at some of the Founding Fathers.
1. Inalienable was listed in this definition but our Declaration of Independence uses unalienable