Penny Thoughts: Are we Near the RIP for Our American Experiment

As the Ogden Horde enjoyed the festivities of this year’s celebration of our Nation’s independence from a tyrannical monarchy, I felt a pride and a warmth well up in me. Yet, at the same time I felt an emptiness at the 2020 July Fourth festivities, which were, for all intents and purposes, severely abridged because of our fear of COVID-19.

I have an old recording “Yankee Doodle Dandy” with James Cagney and “Stars and Stripes Forever” with Clifton Webb–probably because I am so in love with what our Nation has stood for during these past 244 years.

Then I was shocked back into reality as I watched news reports on recent happenings in our Republic. It was then that the awful specter of a massive national debt, a burgeoning federal bureaucracy, a division of my fellow Americans into class segmentations to pit them against one another, our Constitutional liberties having been ignored by authorities, not being  permitted  to go to our houses of worship and I began to shudder.

I wondered what I would be leaving my nine children and 10 grandchildren as a legacy. Then the most horrific of ponderings crashed upon me as explosively as a massive meteor–is the “American Experiment” over?

It is apparent that our educational systems nationwide have seen fit to neglect teaching history and civics–and it has reached a point that many of our youth today do not know the fundamentals of what makes this “American Experiment” so unique in the annals of human history. They mime sound bites from TV, from movies, from videos and other less credible sources which mask their own agendas. Hey, we have even discovered that “Snopes”, the supposed “verifier” of missives streaming at break-neck speed across the internet, is funded, albeit surreptitiously, by George Soros, a real enemy and threat to our freedom and our heritage.

The Founders were faced with an ominous task at the end of the American Revolution. From the victory they had to form a government, and what shape it took would forever frame the way this new nation would be accepted into the community of nations. They adopted James Madison’s Virginia Plan, which called for the three branches of government. We have–the executive, the legislative and the judicial. It was called by cynics the “American Experiment” because it was so radically different from the monarchies and the military dictatorships which had been in place.

That plan had a series of checks and balances which the Founders believed were necessary to create a nation which would continue to be governed to protect the notion of individual freedom.

While the Declaration of Independence laid the basis for its general philosophical approach to freedom and justifications for wanting to break away from England, it is in the Preamble to our Constitution that we find the rudimentary principles upon which we wanted to form a nation whose rule was to be, in the words of Abraham Lincoln, “of the people, by the people, and for the people.”

It begins with the identification of where the real sovereignty of this government was to lay–WE THE PEOPLE. It lists six standards in clear and simple language which were to ensure the continuity of unity of the 13 fragmented States. For those who have not seen it recently, please note it here;

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

By all measures it is the sixth standard that is preeminent and is the culmination of the preceding five which was to ensure individual sovereignty–to “secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.”

I have long believed that this nation was allowed by God to be formed–a God which blessed humankind with free will, the freedom to choose.  And each of us must examine whether the choices we have made throughout our history have been made with that basic notion in mind.

Yet, this world is rife with a plethora of threats from those outside our borders. We have been able to meet those threats with successful conclusion thus far.

Today, however, I believe there are more sinister, more subtle, and more damaging threats America faces – and they all come from WITHIN our borders.

We face the threat of ignorance of our history.  We face the threat of declining belief in government. We face the threat of a degeneration of principles and human decorum which erode our moral fiber. And we face the threat of complacency. It is this complacency which prevents us from acknowledging that individual freedom brings with it the obligation of personal responsibility.

We have become inebriated by those who believe that a strong centralized ruling group can tell each of us how to live, how to spend, how to behave, what to say and what not to say, and we willingly kowtow to the dictates of “laws” mandating and regulating our actions.

WE THE PEOPLE have become lazy with our responsibility to our freedom – and that is the most egregious threat to the security of our American Experiment.

My favorite American, Thomas Jefferson, said it best, as I see it, “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.”

Whether or not Lincoln’s words regarding this Nation–”shall not perish from the earth” –will prevail as practice, or whether our American Experiment faces its epitaph as R.I.P., depends upon every one of us!

It is the obligation of every soul within a free nation to ensure its sovereignty with practices understanding its history, believing in its foundation, its moral fiber and its personal responsibility.

The alternative would be a footnote in history that the “experiment” had not succeeded –and I, for one, refuse to allow this.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the policy or position of The West Alabama Watchman.