Are The Better Days Behind Us?

There was a time when men of real stature occasionally showed up in Washington. Men with the courage of conviction, who believed in the principals upon which our nation was founded. The War of Northern Aggression fixed that.

One such man was named John Cabell Breckenridge who served as US Senator and Attorney General. When war loomed, and the great usurper, Lincoln, prepared to send his armies against us, Breckenridge issued a manifesto to the people of Kentucky, his home state. It contained this remarkably prescient sentence:

"The Federal government – the creature – has set itself above the creator…A subservient congress ratifies the usurpations of the president and proceeds to complete the destruction of the constitution."

Then Breckenridge took off his business suit and put on a gray uniform; by the end of the conflict he was Secretary of War under Jefferson Davis. Does he sound like a man who went to war to defend his stance on slavery? Hardly. Yet that is the nonsense that we, his descendents, are being taught in the public schools.

Jefferson Davis was another such man – vilified now days by lesser men, he was that last of a dead breed, the reluctant politician. He took over the reins of the Southern government because it was thrust upon him, and he was a man who understood the word "duty." Yet his dream would have been to don a uniform and serve in the forces.

In the wonderful utopia that is modern America, our leaders spend money by the bucketful for the dubious honor of "serving" us in Washington. The era of the reluctant civil servant is well behind us. How is it that we have an election and our choices are so rigorously restricted to feeble, weasly non entities? Could it be that such men are best suited to serve an electorate such as we? Perhaps.

Another possibility is more ominous. As we have moved away from Christ, who as we know from Isaiah and the Gospels came as a suffering servant, and performed the duty His Father had set before Him and sought nothing for Himself. Once, our leaders modeled themselves after our Savior – now they model themselves after the enemy of man, and seek only their own venal interests. They are propelled into power by an electorate to whom pandering is a tactic that is always well received, for we are of the same scant substance as the leaders we elect. Mr. Gore for instance, makes no pretence about it and calls his religion a mere "faith tradition," as if Christ were somehow in the same category as the "Great White Buffalo" or Santa Claus.

General Breckenridge, as if visualizing the electorate of our tawdry age, commented on the northerners of his day: "…they eagerly offer to the government what no European monarch would dare to demand. The president and his generals are unable to pick up the liberties of the people as rapidly as they are thrown at their feet." Does that sound like anybody you know? Free prescription drugs anyone? Take my guns, please! Protect me, feel my pain, entertain me, indulge my perversions, and I will serve you willingly.

So what if you make a mockery of the ideals I once believed in, and of my ancestors who fought for those ideals. Who fought and lost. For of whom in American history can we say, "they fought and won a war for freedom." Many of us long for the tender hand of George III, whose tax burden was so ridiculously light that modern day taxpayers would have dubbed him "George the Just!"

Americans who despaired under the tyrannical rule of the British had no idea how it was to really feel a taste of the lash. What would Washington and Jefferson have said to a government which forbade them to grow hemp on their farms (which they did)? Their farms could have been confiscated and their children murdered under the auspices of our modern government's so called "drug war." What would free blacks (there were many more than our modern propagandists would have us believe) have felt about having half their children in jail? What would any colonist have felt about having evolutionary theory and homosexual activism forced on the children in government propaganda centers they have the cheek to refer to as "schools?" We can have a pretty good clue what would have happened to a teacher that usurped the parents authority in the matter of sex education because it would have started with tar and feathers and may well have ended with a noose.

Finally, it is quite obvious what our early American forbears would have said to gun control, because we know darn well what they did say. Because that is exactly what Lexington / Concord was all about. The national government sent troops to confiscate the guns and ammunition that belonged to the locals, and for their pains they were shot to pieces by outraged colonials. In contrast, our modern American citizenry cheered loudly as government troops slaughtered their brothers at Waco, for the specious crime of being out of the mainstream.

Are there so few Americans can left who care about liberty? May God grant that there are enough to keep the flame smoldering because frankly, it looks pretty grim at this point.

November 11, 2000

Mr. Peirce fought with the Rhodesian freedom fighters (the Ian Smith side, of course).

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