Thoughts On Memorial Day
By Tony DiPasquale (05/25/03)
With the celebration of Memorial Day looming, we should take time to re-evaluate our own contributions to our country.
Continually we are reminded that this is to be a holiday to honor those brave men and women who have fought in order to preserve our liberties, but does this mean that because of their work we are void of any obligations ourselves? It seems that vigilance has been replaced with apathy, making it more fitting for us to apologize this Monday to those who have given their lives in defense of our freedom.
Let me begin by apologizing to our Founding Fathers, who despite inconceivable odds, risked everything, including their lives, in order to establish a nation based on laws and the rights of the individual. Since the time of our founding, we have turned a republic premised on the notion of limited government and Judeo-Christian principles, into a bloated bureaucracy that has long since evicted God from virtually all aspects of society. Yet, despite the Founders' warnings, we have traded liberty for security, and have morphed into a democracy, a system they held the strongest of contempt for.
While some may argue that we still retain our republican form of government, most politicians no longer govern through their own convictions constrained by the rule of law. Instead they govern through public opinion polls with no concern for the constitutionality of their legislation. As James Madison so eloquently wrote in Federalist No. 10, "Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths."
Veterans of wars involving the United States are also deserving of our apologies. Even as they risked their lives to protect us from foreign threats to our liberties, we have sat idly by, unwilling to defend these very rights from domestic intrusions.
Take for instance the Patriot Act. Clearly this legislation threatens our freedom, yet opposition, while growing, has not become substantial enough to rescind this legislation enacted by Congress. This most over-reaching act allows for the government to, in a single step, eliminate many of our constitutionally protected rights.
But this egregious move against liberty did not start here; look at all the laws that have been enacted by Congress without any constitutional basis for their passage. Rather than demand that the constraints of our Constitution be upheld, we let the very politicians who have sworn oaths to defend this precious document pass laws that erode its purpose entirely.
And we must not forget that every veteran has fought in these wars to not only protect the freedoms of our country's current inhabitants, but of our posterity as well. Our way of saying thanks: we have allowed the murder of millions of babies since the passage of Roe v. Wade. How can we ever hope to maintain our own freedom if we refuse to defend the liberties of the helpless unborn?
This Memorial Day we should not only take the time to be grateful for those who have fought to preserve freedom, but also become determined ourselves to protect those liberties that still remain, and possibly regain some that have been lost.
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