We Can Run, But We Cannot Hide
By William Bailey (09/04/03)
“The time has come, the walrus said,
To talk of many things:”
The words above are the beginning of a, somewhat, nonsensical passage taken from Lewis Carroll’s, “Through the Looking Glass”. It goes on to talk about the sea being “boiling hot” and, “whether pigs have wings”. Well . . . I don’t want to talk about whether the sea is “boiling hot” or whether “pigs have wings”. I want to talk about the fact that “The time has come”.
The time has come for us to face up to the fact that we can try to run from history, but we cannot and will not be able to successfully hide from it. No nation state in the history of the world has ever done it . . . why are we so arrogant as to believe that we can ? There seems to be an attitude in place in the U.S. that says we don’t have to worry about tomorrow . . . we don’t have to worry about a thing called accountability. But, as sure as the Sun moves from the East to the West, there will be a tomorrow and someone will be held accountable. We seem to be rather carefree when it comes to the statement, “those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it”.
In our short 200+ years of setting the example of what liberty and freedom are all about, we have moved further and further away from the very principles on which this nation was founded. We started as a nation built on the belief that, for the Republic to succeed, there should not be a strong, central Federal government. All of the historical evidence (the Federalist Papers, the Constitutional debates) confirms that the Founders never intended for this to happen. That’s why they were so specific in identifying the powers of the three branches of government, but made certain that the Tenth Amendment granted all non-specific powers to the states. The historical record, unfortunately, confirms that we are far afield from the original intent of the Founders.
See if you recognize any of the following:
- “refused to assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.”
- “forbidden Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance.”
- “refused to pass Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people.”
- “erected a multitude of new offices, and sent swarms of officers to harass people.”
- “combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution and unacknowledged by our laws, giving assent to their acts of pretended legislation.”
- “excited domestic insurrections among us.”
These words were written by another group (at another time) who had grown concerned about the direction of this new nation. The words were part of that document that started us on this journey . . . the Declaration of Independence.
The reason I make reference to the above is to clearly identify where we began so that we might get a better picture of where we are. And, to reinforce the adage that “we can run, but we cannot hide” from the inevitable consequences of our actions. If we continue to “ignore history”, we will be “doomed to repeat it”.
In 1788, Edward Gibbon wrote the historical masterpiece, “The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire”. Gibbon set forth five reasons why great civilizations wither and die: “1) The undermining of the dignity and sanctity of the home, which is the basis for human society; 2) Higher and higher taxes and the spending of public money for free bread and circuses for the populaces; 3) The made craze for pleasure, sports becoming every year more exciting, more brutal, more immoral; 4) The building of great armaments when the real enemy is within, the decay of individual responsibility; and 5) The decay of religion, with faith fading into mere form, losing touch with life, losing power to guide people.”
Look around . . . see if you can determine how many of these five requisites set out by Gibbon are present in today’s U.S.
Historians tell us that the average age of the world’s great civilizations has been about 200 years. There is, according to them, a process through which civilizations and empires move. It looks something akin to this:
From bondage to spiritual faith
From spiritual faith to great courage
From great courage to liberty
From liberty to abundance
From abundance to selfishness
From selfishness to complacency
From complacency to apathy
From apathy to dependence
From dependence back again to bondage
As you review that cycle, where would you say we are at the present time ?
We can run, but we cannot hide. We cannot hide from the fact that if we ignore history we will be doomed to repeat it. The choice is clearly ours. We can continue on this “happy-go-lucky”, “worry-about-it-tomorrow” road that we’ve been traveling or we can take some actions to put us back “on course” to achieve the destiny intended for a freedom and liberty loving people.
We can run, but we cannot hide.
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