by Tim Dake
Irecently attended the Americans For Prosperity’s Defending the American Dream Summit in the Dells. I sat next to a friend who is a professional speaker and he commented that the mark of a good speaker is one who says something that you find yourself thinking about three days later. I did hear something that I am now finding myself thinking about three days later.
Tim Phillips, president of Americans For Prosperity, said that he had attended a conference that included 22 people that had earned (not won) the Congressional Medal of Honor. Phillips stated that he had talked to several of these remarkable men. One man told Phillips that he was awarded the medal for his actions on the day after D-day but he was most proud of the eight continuous months of hard daily fighting that followed that day. Phillips told us that all that we do is important but pales in comparison to those distinguished men. Their sacrifices outstrip anything that we do, but our commitment must equal theirs.
This statement resonated with me and continued todoso three days later.Onmydesk is a picture of one of my great-great-grandfathers, James Wyatt Crooks. He is wearing his Union Army uniform and standing in front of a cannon. He served as a private in Company E of the 25th Indiana Volunteer Infantry. The picture was taken after the Civil War at a gathering of the Grand Army of the Republic. Pinned to his chest is a GAR Shiloh Survivor’s medallion. His unit fought, vastly outnumbered, for over two hours holding their ground while the rest of their division ran. Crooks was the only child of a father that died when Crooks was a baby and a mother that never remarried. He was later wounded at the battle of LaGrange, Tennessee and suffered from his injuries until his death in 1923.
I have studied this picture for years and wondered what he thought of his experience and whether he believed that the country that he found after the Civil War was better than the one that he left his farm and widowed mother to defend at the age of 19. His sacrifice was far greater than that of any of us involved in the Tea Party Patriot Movement today. But our commitment is no less than his a century and a half ago.
Similarly, my late father-in-law was a teenager when he left high school to join the Navy in January of 1944. He was a plank owner on the aircraft carrier USS Shangri-la and lived through kamikaze attacks while many of his friends were still in geometry class. I had the privilege of getting to know him, unlike my great-great-grandfather Crooks, and to learn what he thought of the nation to which he returned after his war. My wife tells of a father that despised communism and socialism and feared the Cold War. He sent two sons to the Vietnam War and did so without complaint. He took our politics and our nation’s course in history very seriously.
These men had in common a love of their country that included a willing sacrifice of not only their lives if need be, but that of their sons. They recognized the price of liberty and the value of our constitutional republic.
Those of us planning tea parties, attending protests, writing e-mail and letters to the editor are making our own contribution to restore the Republic although it does not require the same physical risk and commitment that our forefathers have made. I cannot help but wonder how far we will have to go to preserve our constitutional republic, and if the price demanded is higher than which we are paying now, will we also rise to the call of history? We owe our forefathers no less of a commitment to our nation and our Constitution than that which they made and carried out on our behalf. We must fulfill that obligation by making sure that the constitutional republic is passed to the unborn future generations intact.
The current Congress and administration’s blatant disregard for the unconstitutionality of the various pieces of legislation proposed and pursued is not just legally worrisome but politically frightening. The slippery slope is now in front of us; each piece of legislation is more egregious than the previous one with not a small incremental advancement in governmental power but a shocking, aggressive increase frombill to bill.Whenthe Speaker of the House of Representatives answers a question on the constitutionality of the health care bill with “Are you serious? Are you serious?” it becomes undeniably apparent that Congress no longer cares about the constitutionality of legislation. When the House attempts to advance a bill to a vote without even writing, let alone reading and publishing the bill, by boldly “deeming” the bill to have passed, it signals that our Constitution has been officially scrapped by the very government that our Constitution created.
Can we continue to live in a state of denial? Denial that we are no longer operating under our Constitution? Denial that we are no longer a Republic founded on law and order? Denial that there are no longer rules to our government? Denial that our representatives no longer actually represent us? Denial of reality.
We need to return to reality and face the constitutional problem that is plaguing us. The Republic is not merely slipping away; it is being forcibly wrested from us. To claim that the administration is merely fundamentally transforming our nation in some glorious, populist fashion which demands that if we all just agree that it is wonderful, then it will somehow work out, is a fraud that masks a form of treason which is taking place. The fabric of our nation is unraveling and a price will be paid for the neglect that this nation has suffered for the last 50 years. How much will you pay for this new fundamentally transformed nation? And in what currency?