My response to a Letter to the Editor in the Daily Sun (P 5):
Once again, we are confronted with either the spectre of the our educational system deemphasizing the actual reading and studying of the US Constitution or the replacement by the Progressive agenda: the replacement of the negative Rights enumerated in the Constitution barring the Government from abridging those Rights, to the Positive Rights that the Progressives demand that Government do things for you.
The former only requires one to be left alone and not interfered with; however, the latter requires that someone else’s freedom and goods be taken from them to supply to someone else.
Ms. LeClerc said "I think we lost track of what the purpose of government is. The purpose of government, is to help people when in need."
Rather, I think we have lost sight of what our individual responsibilities should be towards our friends, neighbors, and family. We no longer, as a society, are refusing to take on the responsibility that our grandparents and great-grandparents believed to be a normal part of life (or via the mutual aid societies that existed before Government crowded them out, for who can compete against taxpayer supplied Government finances and regulations?).
Instead, with the demand that Government take care of the needy, we see yet another example of "I don’t want to do this – let’s outsource our responsibility to Government". And that is exactly what Ms. LeClerc just said.
I do hope, however, that the Scripture she quoted was aimed at individuals to exhort them to action rather than as an apologist demanding that Government do more.
To the editor,
Mmmm. Tears are shed. Here it’s New Years Day 2011 and history repeats itself, it was a sad day for America. If you still travel around the country on the trains and the turnpikes, back roads, you still will see Americans with their children, homeless veterans after fi ghting a war, living in camps, tents, cardboard huts, sleeping in back alleys, on the riverbank, in fi elds. It hasn’t gone away — we have.
I believe it is up to Congress to help make their lives better, if we can go to other countries and call their leadership evil for the way they treat their citizens, what do we call ours? We, they, Congress, our leaders, can have everything in life they want if they just help others to get the things they need. No one chooses to be homeless, without jobs, food, medical care.
I think we lost track of what the purpose of government is. The purpose of government, is to help people when in need. If people prosper, so will our country. Some live in a bubble, they don’t see or feel the suffering.
Yes, history has repeated itself, well we continue in the same selfless way? We throw God and country, yellow ribbons, patriotism in everything we “say.” But what do we “do?”
“For if you do for the least of these, you do for me.”
Pray for America, we need all the help we can get.
Nancy Leclerc
North Woodstock
