Melopa,
I could not hear your comment as anything but a sarcastic insult that did equate my belief that the nation is an indivisible union as I have pledged since a child, to both "Big governemt" liberalism, and worse, to Marxist Communism.
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indivisible,...that word was specifically placed in the pledge as a creedal statement against the doctrine of secession
Put in by a professing Socialist. How conservative of you.
Socialists, like Communists, do prefer a STRONG federal government.
To better oppress us, I dare say...
The actual "American Creed" approved by Congress and written by William Tyler Page (a patriot, like Bellamy, but without any of the baggage associated with late 19th cent Christian Nationalism movement) still contains the essence of our political thought and history distilled:
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I believe in the United States of America, as a government of the people, by the people, for the people; whose just powers are derived from the consent of the governed; a democracy in a republic; a sovereign Nation of many sovereign States; a perfect union, one and inseparable; established upon those principles of freedom, equality, justice, and humanity for which American patriots sacrificed their lives and fortunes.
I therefore believe it is my duty to my country to love it, to support its Constitution, to obey its laws, to respect its flag, and to defend it against all enemies.[
This is my creed as a citizen.
I do lose patience when I encounter those who seem to ethier ignore or be ignorant of the long and triumphant history of our nation. In my work as an historian, and especially as an historian of the American South, I frequently encounter unreconstructed Southerners who somehow want to refight the Civil War. They operate as if both the events of that war and the events since that war did not occur. It is a theoretical disputation in an historic vacuum. I know the arguments. I know that many have merrit or had merrit. But it was settled. It was settled in blood. The argument is as helpful to our current list of greviences as whether Christians could oppose by force God's ordained King and governemt in 1776. That was a serious debate. It is interesting even today. It may apply to whether Christians can today resist government. But it will never result in the restoration of the King or Queen of England to their position of authority over the colonies of North America.
But I do believe the unseriousness of proposals for interposition or secession masks the very seriousness of the issues you raise.
Many folks do feel powerless, they are frustrated, some to the point of desperation, some to the point of violence, many to the point of vicariously soaking in the warm rhetoric of violence and miliant resistance offered by demagogues and dangerous ideologues.
But this begs a point prompted by one of your fair statements of lament for our people and nation:
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In reality, I'm venting my frustrations on how helpless a people we are becoming. Powerless to legally and civilly effect the change we need, not the change we are getting.
Are we in fact helpless? Do we possess no power legal or civil?
As frustrated as we are, I believe we still possess all the tools to fix our situation and redeem our society.
The ballot box, though battered, is still intact. And trust me, even with St. Louis or Philly or ACORN doing their best to corrupt, the ballot and the rule of We The People through elections has encountered, and defeated, far worse.
Faith remains and, though I would be among the first to argue that there is a concerted effort to drive faith from the public square, it has not come close. We remain the most religious people in the Western World. And that is why, though less perhaps than in the past, we remain the most free.
It is too easy a choice to blame our situation on powerful forces agianst which we have no recourse. That is intellectually and morally lazy. Their is no force of business, conspiracy of finance, cabal of athiests and Marxists who have brought us to this moment of crisis.
We have done it. We The People have elected this government to rule and then called it tyranny when it did what we asked it to do. And I do not mean simply the current administration, but every government under our charter.
The founders who have escaped our current obsession with their thoughts and lives (like the facination many have for Paine or Sam Adams) were those founders whose great fear was whether they were overestimating the capacity of man for self-restraint and self-government. That once unleased each and every man would "do what was right in his own eyes." Such an eventuality would ultimately lead to debt, moral decay, and social/political collapse. These founders were willing to take the risk but knew that only restrained liberty could work.
Our whole system of government with its checks and balances is an indictment against the schemes of men. The founders assumed that those with power would abuse it and must be curtailed and hemmed in. But it was not just against the grasping nature of "powerful" men but all men that we sought protections.
Our systems are brilliant and resilliant. Only four nations in the world left the 20th century with the same forms of government (Constitutions) they had when they entered them; the U.S., Switzerland, Britain, Australia (even Canada's lapsed). Our durabilty and greatness rests in our responsiveness to the will of the people without fully trusting any people, including the voter. Our problem is not the Fed, Wallstreet, or TARP (they are the symptoms not the disease). Our problem is We The People as well as blaming others for our own lack of self-restraint and our own short-sighted selfish habits in voting.
Cassius:
"The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings."
Julius Caesar (I, ii, 140-141)
The great hope is also in this statement. That the same capacity for self-government can be restored. A people that do not restrain themselves will not build a government of restraint. We can again recognize the risk of doing "what is right in our own eyes" and restrain both ourselves and the excesses of our fellow citizens througn the ballot, education, civil associations, and religious associations.
Melopa you are not my enemy. The Enemy (and as a Christian I know you believe this and I have read it in your posts) is our enemy.
We are the last great hope on earth. We must stand united and with hope and confidence.
This really is what it is all about:
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Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.