“When we said, ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,’ the reality is that this principle had been self-evident to practically no one throughout thousands of years of history.”
When we said that all men are ‘endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,’ it got people’s attention, and suddenly others began to agree. When we said humans are entitled to ‘Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,’ it became a violation to impede such things. But make no mistake. These notions were not mainstream when our founders threw down the gauntlet with the Declaration of Independence.”
…I always find it odd that America alone is criticized for injustices such as slavery, racism, inequality, and civil rights violations. It’s as if the vast majority of people are truly under the impression these injustices only ever happened here. In truth, the entirety of human history is marred by these evils, and in many places, you’ll find much worse conditions for civil liberties to this day.”
And the preponderance of those views we now enjoy throughout large parts of the world belies just how fringe they once were. The founding of the US turned the world upside down—not because we eradicated injustice with these words, but because by alleging them we created a new standard by which governments and countries are now judged.
-Hannah Cox (Weren’t We Always Extremists?)
Our forefathers WERE extremists – they rebelled against the established order of the day. They rebelled against the conventional wisdom of the day. That was the time of The Divine Right of Kings – that the King (and his aristocracy) ruled because God foreordained it. To rebel against the King and his Laws / Decrees was to rebel against God Himself.
Until Martin Luther, rebelling against the excesses of the Catholic Church, nailed his Theses to the church door and started a revolution of spiritual thought. After such time, that notion spread all because Luther recaptured the essence of what it was to worship God – in a personal way and not “bottlenecked” through the priesthood or Royals. Each person was sovereign before God and personally responsible for that relationship.
And that was the RADICAL, EXTREMIST view brought forward, after much history and philosophical study, that our Founding Fathers brought forward – that Government was beneath OUR feet, that was to work for OUR interests, and most of all, was to protect OUR Liberties, Rights, and Freedoms instead of being those required to protect that of the King. WE were the sovereigns and not the King (and not to be confused with the “Sovereign Citizen” movement).
The Left, on this Day and all others as well, can only speak to the wrongs of America while the rest of us know the right things that America has done and are grateful that we are citizens of this country. They are working hard to distort and bastardize our history, for without our history, we have no firm Principles to guide us. By not educating our children in that history, they seek to kneecap us – he who changes our history controls our future. Make no mistake – they wish to make the words of Soviet Union’s Nikita Krushchev come true: “We will bury you” – by first burying those radical notions first.
Cox is right – by taking what those Founding Father “Extremists” created, we have changed much of the world – and ourselves. They wish to regress back to that time of the Divine Right of Kings – not in those words but those not at the top would end back up as serfs just as the vast majority of people were back in that time – living solely at the sufferance of those at the top.
Is this how you wish to be? Your family? Your friends? The extremist vision of being able to decide for ourselves, to make decisions that are best for ourselves? Or to bend on our knees and say “Thank you sir, may I have another one?” in all of Life’s areas?
That work of continuing Liberty’s reach is not yet done but we MUST, as I said before, must keep focused on keeping America to be that “City of Light on the Hill” – no other country has ever attempted to be that place where Liberty and Freedom are most highly valued premises. No other country has been founded on that extremist Principle – that the Individual matters and not the collective.
(H/T: Instapundit)
