Today was Step #1. I think it’d be great to do pretty much the same thing again on Constitution Day, Saturday, September 17. We had a good band of patriots in attendance today, but hopefully, Constitution Day will be much, much better.
Here’s pretty much what I’d said today:
Eleven score and fifteen years ago, our founding fathers waged war against their own government.
Yet it seems that to many Americans today, Independence Day is about flags, fireworks, and a day off work.
Let us humbly recognize that because of our founders’ sacrifices, We The People have what We The People have chosen. Our votes and our daily actions leave us nobody else to blame for any of the injustice, corruption and violence around us.
Indeed if the so-called “Arab Spring” of uprisings in the middle east teaches us anything, it’s that ALL government, even the most oppressive, is by consent of the governed.
Here in the USA, we can simply choose how we’d like to live; and we can do it in safe, air-conditioned, button-pushing comfort.
After generations of choices, it’s obvious that the life we have chosen is not at all what our founders sacrificed, fought and died to bequeath us.
Out of the 27 specific complaints listed in the Declaration of Independence, there is only one, rather minor mention of taxation. Obviously there were no complaints about healthcare or Social Security. The colonists weren’t mad about working conditions or Daylight Saving Time. They weren’t asking for anything special or even new.
Our nation’s founders’ first and underlying complaint was that they’d been denied what was due all English people: They were denied English Law.
The very first-listed complaint against the king was that “He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.”
That’s important; let me repeat that. “He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.”
Now, to those who don’t know anything about Libertarians, it may seem odd that I would stress that our libertarian founders wanted laws.
But what we have instead of laws today is an endless stream of contradictory words, spit out like machine gun bullets by bureaucrats, judges, lawmakers and executives that produce the effect of power without authority; politics without any restraint …ungoverned government. Rules change daily, corruption is everywhere, and the violence is incessant.
This lawless, politicized anarchy is just not working.
It’s a basic human need that we must know the rules by which we must live. It’s the most basic justice that these rules should be applied in a way that’s fair, or at least predictable.
So here’s what we’re asking for:
We want rules that are few enough that everybody can know them; simple enough that everyone can understand them, and important enough that every one of them is to be obeyed by everybody without exception, all the time. We want these rules to stay put for long enough to plan a business or a retirement; or better yet, to raise a child to see that law and order is a thing to be desired, and chosen.
OK, so we’ve all had reasons to oppose such simple order and justice. Maybe our fear of foreigners, our political tribal loyalties and hatreds, the past sins of slavery or our greed and ignorance made us use the constitutions as tug-of-war ropes. We’d grab onto our favorite rights to yank away somebody else’s.
But those of us here today have learned our lesson. We will sacrifice our pet violations, or even the degree of freedom we think the constitutions deny us, in order to gain some measure of liberty and justice, for all.
We want to know the rules. And we’re all fine with what is already the proven, signed and once-revered Law of the Land.
Bottom line: We want our constitutions, state and federal, as written, back.
We Declare 