It was a harsh calling out of the American character, when American men and women still took honor seriously. An insult of one’s courage was an insult against one’s honor and required a response. Thomas Paine was rapping on the door of that culture of masculinity when he wrote The American Crisis. Starting the pamphlet with a challenge to all combat aged men of the colonies and a compliment to those serving their country in the uncertain months of 1776. And it is just as much a rebuke now of the American countryman who stands idle while his country is in peril.

In the two hundred and forty years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, our nation’s very existence has been threatened by the British twice, the Civil War, two World Wars, the Great Depression, the Cold War, Islamic Terrorism, the Great Recession, and our greatest threat of all, the National Debt. Of all of the items on this list, only the last is self inflicted, and only it will likely lead to our impending destruction, because the majority of Americans refuses to do anything about it.

So devoted are these people to not doing anything about it, they have created a bogeyman political issue of “illegal immigration“, which did not even make the list. It did not make the list, because illegal immigration does not fundamentally threaten the culture of this country. The reality is the country the Founders gave us is gone, and the illegal immigrants are simply feasting on the corpse of a nation whose People have traded their Liberty for security and deserve neither, while lacking the moral fortitude to do what is necessary to rectify it. We’ve become a culture of fear.

‘Tis surprising to see how rapidly a panic will sometimes run through a country. All nations and ages have been subject to them.
-Thomas Paine

Culturally, America was founded on the principles of Liberty, which required a small and limited government. This also required Americans be willing to suffer the risk of personal deprivation while providing for themselves, because there was no government to rescue them. With each wave of immigration in the past, the “tempest tossed” newcomers found that, while there was no government to sustain them, there was also no government to keep them from the profit of their industry.

As government made no effort to control employment, jobs, however mean, were plentiful. The good hearted proprietor could usually offer a few pennies to hire an ambitious young immigrant, and those pennies were often all that was needed for a family to get by. This was America from July 4th, 1776 until the dawn of the 20th Century, when the progressive leftists finally won. Those penny jobs that children worked in the hours after school to help their families make ends meet became, according to the progressive leftists, “exploitative“, as did a great many other American values.

America began to change, mutate, and ultimately lose its culture of independence, all in the name, assured the progressive leftists, of society advancing forward. It was, after all, what all the other advanced countries were doing. America had to fit in with European democratic socialism or it wasn’t fit to be associated with them. So in came a wave of social and economic reforms, including the government suddenly dictating which wages were legal and which were not, the introduction of welfare programs, and, the coup d’ grace, the institutionalization of taxation to pay for these fancy new programs.

This is when America died. One hundred years ago, when Americans forgot that the price of economic and political security was the loss of sacred Liberty.

I should not be afraid to go with a hundred Whigs against a thousand Tories, were they to attempt to get into arms. Every Tory is a coward; for servile, slavish, self-interested fear is the foundation of Toryism; and a man under such influence, though he may be cruel, never can be brave.
-Thomas Paine

We’ve fallen a long way from the days in which Thomas Paine wrote to a fledgling nation of men and women who were just beginning to understand the full ramifications of war against the British Crown. Before that moment in history, it was impossible to even conceive of telling the government what the people made and how they made it was of no business of the government. That was the fundamental core of who the American people were. How, then, have we come to be who we are now?

A people so emaciated of the will to suffer and fight that we attack any who would try to tear down the sacred cows of Social Security, Medicare, Welfare, taxation of personal incomes, and the minimum wage, the very things that are destroying our country right before our eyes. Now, when threatened with the very extinction of our nation, many reject the very principles that the nation was founded on and cling ever tighter to the very progressive leftist policies that have done so much damage to it.

We have become a nation of Toryism, individuals so married to nationality that they will fight against those awakened few who stand for Liberty. As we celebrate the two hundred and fortieth anniversary of our Founders taking up arms against their countrymen to fight for the cause of Liberty, so it has come to pass that true American patriots of Liberty seem once again poised to fight against their countrymen for the cause of Liberty, if only the spirit of resistance remains strong enough to do so.

I thank God, that I fear not. I see no real cause for fear. I know our situation well, and can see the way out of it.
-Thomas Paine

This Independence Day, consider the price of your family’s Liberty, and, as you listen to our national anthem, seriously answer the question at the end. “Does that Star Spangled Banner yet wave over the land of the free and the home of the brave?” Or does it hangs over the funeral procession of long dead Liberty with scavengers picking over her still corpse as we watch in silent impotent horror, doing nothing.

Be Brave. Be Free.

 

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Liberty is For The Win!