|
(click on ads for more
details)
|
|
Most Americans should be ashamed to
celebrate the Fourth.
By Vin Suprynowicz (7-16-01) (sent in by a reader)
What an inconvenient holiday the Fourth of July has
become.
So long as we stick to grilling hot dogs and hamburgers,
hauling the
kids to the lake or the mountains, and winding
up the day watching the fireworks as the Boston Pops
plays the
"1812" -- written by a subject of the czar to
celebrate
the defeat of our vital ally the French -- we can
usually
manage to convince ourselves we still cling to the
same values
that made July 4, 1776, a date that continues
to ring in
history.
Great Britain taxed the colonists at far lower rates than
Americans
tolerate today -- and never dreamed of granting
government agents the power to search our private bank
records to
locate "unreported income," nor to haul away
our children to some mandatory, government-run
propaganda
camp, doping up the most spirited youths on
Luvox or Ritalin. Nor did the king's ministers ever
attempt to
stack our juries by disqualifying any juror who
refused
to swear in advance to leave their
conscience
outside and
enforce the law as the judge explained it to
them.
The king's ministers insisted the colonists were represented
by Members
of Parliament who had never set foot on these
shores.
Today, of course, our interests are "represented"
by one of
two millionaire lawyers -- both members of the
incumbent
Republicrat Party -- between whom we were
privileged
to "choose" last election day, men who for the
most part
have lived in mansions and sent their kids to
private
schools in the wealthy suburbs of the imperial
capital for decades.
Yet the colonists did rebel. It's hard to imagine, today, the
faith and
courage of a few hundred frozen musketmen,
setting off across the darkened Delaware, gambling their
lives and
farms on the chance they could engage and
defeat the
greatest land army in the history of the known
world, armed
with only two palpable assets: one
irreplaceable
man to lead them, and some flimsy
newspaper
reprints of a parchment declaring: "We hold
these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created
equal, that
they are endowed by their Creator with certain
unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and
the Pursuit
of Happiness -- That to secure these Rights,
Governments
are instituted among men, deriving their just
Powers from
the Consent of the Governed, that whenever
any Form of
Government becomes destructive to these
Ends, it is
the Right of the People to alter or abolish it. ..."
Do we believe that, still?
Recently, President Clinton's then-Drug Czar, Lee Brown,
told me the
role of government is to protect people from
dangers, such as drugs. I corrected him, saying, "No, the
role of
government is to protect our liberties."
"We'll just have to disagree on that," the president's
appointee
said.
The War for American Independence began over
unregistered
untaxed guns, when British forces attempted
to seize
arsenals of rifles, powder, and ball from the hands
of
ill-organized Patriot militias in Lexington and Concord.
American
civilians shot and killed scores of those
government agents as they marched back to Boston. Are
those
Minutemen still our heroes? Or do we now consider
them "dangerous terrorists" and "depraved
government-haters"?
In Phoenix last week, an air-conditioner repairman and
former
military
policeman named Chuck Knight was
convicted by jurors -- some tearful -- who said they had no
choice under
the judge's instructions, on a single federal
conspiracy count of associating with others who owned
automatic
rifles on which they had failed to pay the $200
transfer tax. This was after a trial in which defense
attorney
Ivan Abrams says he was forbidden to bring up
the Second Amendment as a defense.
In The Federalist No. 29, James Madison sought to
assuage the
fears of anti-federalists who worried the
proposed new
government might someday take away our
freedoms:
"If circumstances should at any time oblige the
government
to form an army of any magnitude," he wrote,
"that
army can never be formidable to the liberties of the
people while
there is a large body of citizens, little if at all
inferior to
them in discipline and the use of arms, who
stand ready to defend their rights and those of their fellow
citizens."
Any such encroachments by
government would "provoke
plans of
resistance, "Mr. Madison continued in The
Federalist
No. 46, and "an appeal to a trial of force,"
made
possible by "the advantage of being armed, which
the Americans possess over the people of almost every
other
nation."
Were Arizona's Viper Militia readying plans of resistance,
as
recommended by Mr. Madison? Would the
Constitution
ever have been ratified at all had Mr.
Madison and
his fellow federalists warned the citizens that
such non-violent preparations would get their weapons
seized and
land them in jail for decades?
Happy Fourth of July.
Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the
Las Vegas
Review-Journal. Subscribe to his monthly
newsletter
by sending $72 to Privacy Alert, 561 Keystone
Ave., Suite
684, Reno, NV 89503 -- or dialing
775-348-8591. His book, "Send in the Waco Killers:
Essays on
the Freedom Movement, 1993-1998," is
available at
1-800-244-2224, or via web site
www.thespiritof76.com/wacokillers.html.
***
Vin Suprynowicz, vin@lvrj.com "When great changes
occur in
history, when great principles are involved, as a
rule the majority are wrong. The minority are right." --
Eugene V. Debs (1855-1926)
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed
-- and thus clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an
endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." -- H.L. Mencken
|
