June 14, 2009
Aboard No Boundaries
We don’t get a lot of news, and we actually like it that way. In case you haven’t noticed, people who report the news invariably tell you how bad things are. They tell you that whether you know it or not, your personal fiscal stability is terribly at risk. They tell you horror stories about people who have lost their jobs or been bankrupted by healthcare expense. They tell you that eating butter will kill you and maybe that doesn’t even matter, because before butter does you in, global warming will destroy all the food, so there!
We do get a little news when we choose to tune in. News in small doses impacts the mind differently than news that never stops. Maybe that is why we think the way we do.
We observe, in our small doses, that something very strange is happening in our country. Our president is ignoring the Constitution as if it didn’t exist, and the news reporters and most citizens seem inclined to let that happen. It amazes us. The Constitution is our bulwark against oppressive autocracy. It is the wall around us and our freedoms that keeps the federal government at bay. It is the force that clears the playing field so that as individuals, each of us can become the best we know how to be, and each of us can thrive without being robbed by the government of everything we work for. The news we hear seems to be saying that the Constitutional protections and support are no longer in action.
It is terrifying. This is the sort of thing that happens in countries like Venezuela, not the USA. How did we get here?
The Constitution includes some guarantees of freedom that seem to me to be terribly at risk right now. I heard that a bill was proposed in Congress that would allow the president to declare an emergency and shut down the internet in the USA. How can anyone even consider such a thing, let alone do it? I heard that the president thought it was inappropriate for him to pray publicly on the National Day of Prayer, an attitude that makes me ask if he thinks all of us who pray publicly are doing something wrong. I also heard that any faith-based program that takes government money will take in a set of regulations that would choke a horse, and the point of all those regulations is to assure that none of the money received advances the religious objectives of the program. It makes me ask who would get to decide where that very fine line had been crossed, and it makes me believe that every program whose goals are to serve God would be wise to steer clear of federal money.
In fact, this very issue brings up something that bothers me a lot. It appears to me that our president is trying very hard to make citizens believe that nothing good will ever happen to them unless the government does it. The automobile industry cannot survive unless the government runs it. The finance industry cannot survive without government money, and therefore cannot survive without government ownership. The healthcare industry will completely implode unless the government controls it. The entire globe is set to self-destruct unless the US government forces people to stop using petroleum and start living on air. Maybe if we heard these things day in and day out, we would be used to hearing them and would not worry. However, we hear them intermittently, and when we hear such things it feels as if we have been slapped from here to next Tuesday. We ask ourselves if we have wandered off course somehow and wound up in some other country. What country is this where everything and everybody is dependent on the federal government? Oh, it could be the USA after all, because Barack Obama was elected president, and he said long ago that the Constitution was deficient, because it didn’t say anything about what the government would do FOR the citizens. Well, the only reason to expect the government to do anything FOR citizens is a belief that the citizens cannot do it for themselves.
This mantra sounds a lot like ancient Rome. In the Roman empire of the first century, people were led to believe that Roman rule was necessary for their prosperity. At first, Roman armies conquered territory and brought their version of law and order. The ensuing era, labeled the pax romana included stories of kingdoms which voluntarily associated with Rome in order to get Roman law and order and the protection of the Roman army. These countries believed that their prosperity depended on what Rome could do for them. In years to come they learned to regret the relationship. The New Testament records how the common people experienced this “beneficence.” In fact, despite the seeming good of the pax many people might well have thought it was a pox because of the corruption and tyranny.
I have always been proud to be a citizen of the USA, and I have always believed that our Constitution provided the kind of protection people really need – not a guarantee that all will be rosy or that everyone will have the same amount of money, or even that everyone can go to a doctor at no cost. The Constitution protects the freedom of citizens to scrap it out for themselves. Citizens can work hard and learn and grow and become what they want, not what someone else thinks they should be. Our educational system has never in the past been mandated or paid for by the federal government, so people in different places got different input in the education experience. It has produced diversity and creativity unmatched anywhere. Small businesses have sprouted and died like mushrooms in the spring, but some have thrived and grown to provide income and opportunity for people not so innovative. Let’s ask ourselves honestly, why do people in almost every country in the world want to come here to live?
It isn’t for free healthcare. Some of them come here from countries where they have what passes for that. It isn’t for tiny cars; other countries have many more of those than we do. They come here for the opportunity that exists here to a degree unparalleled anywhere else in the world. Opportunity. Not guaranteed equality. Not checks for $250. OPPORTUNITY!
I’m getting off my soapbox now. Maybe the next time I hear the news I will discover that this was all a bad dream and I imagined the whole thing. I hope for the news to change and revert to the story of a free nation of independent citizens who do not rely on government for their prosperity and happiness. We thought we would go cruising and see sights and then come back home to the USA. It is scary to be asking, is this our home? Are we really still at home? If we left, how do we get back to the home we grew up in?