Please read this. I'm posting an article written by my best friend, Kenny Clipner. I have his permission to post in this format. His contact information is at the end of the article. This is excellent material!
 
“We hold these truths to be self evident” ...

Do we? Which document is this from? If you said “the Constitution”, you are wrong.

It is from the Declaration of Independence. We were sick of the tyranny of King George. We could tolerate it no longer. We declared ourselves free! We fought, we sacrificed, we died. But we had purpose. We had truth. Man longs to be free! This was self-evident. Man has rights that are God-given and cannot be taken away! This, too, was self-evident. Man loves freedom! Again, self-evident. We were not a special people - just a people who listened to the truth that is common to all of us - that is in all of us.

We won our freedom. We established our rights in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. We the people. We governed ourselves. We prospered unlike any other people in the history of humanity. And as we prospered, we couldn’t stand to see others suffer, not by any cause of their own, but by the tyranny of others . Once again, (and again, and again….) we fought, we sacrificed, we died. But we had purpose. We hoped that our blood, which temporarily freed humans from the bondage of others, would ignite the same self-evident truths in them. Their desire to be free - really free - would lead them to establish that freedom for others.

Freedom breeds success, because it allows us to try, to fail, to try again, to learn, to grow, to succeed. But success also breeds complacency. We become fat. We become comfortable. We desire more. It’s not necessarily important how we get it, just that we get it. We begin to trade our rights, yes those same rights that were God-given, (See I said no one can take them, but we are free to give them away) for security. “We are a successful country. Let the government handle some things…. And some more…… and some more…..” and we wake up not in a country of the people, by the people, and for the people, but instead one that resembles something from our past. Something we hated. A country of people, for other people, by the government. We left truth for comfort. We left freedom for tyranny. The fruit of our labor, which we used to choose to share of our own free will, is now handled for us by the government. (How nice of them.) Somehow the government that used to serve us has become our master. We work for them!

We feel the shackles tightening around our hands and feet. Those self-evident truths almost seem distant enough to be a dream, but because we have tasted those truths - those freedoms - we know it is not a dream. The dream has become a nightmare. We struggle to wake up as the government soothes us with the calm, but authoritative voice of the man with the big smile. “Trust us. Just please stay asleep….”

But something is wrong in our nice soft bed. We toss and turn but cannot open our eyes. We lie in our own sweat fearing we may lose something, but we don’t know what or how…

It is now that our eyes fly open and we find the thief in our house, taking all that is ours. He rapes our children with what we used to call education, but which has disintegrated into indoctrination. And your house isn’t enough. He is in all the houses. He is in your business and your neighbor’s. You plead for help only to find that those in authority whom you once trusted have been replaced by people who hate freedom. They hate freedom for others, that is, but not their own. They hate truth, unless they thought of it up themselves.

And then you remember…..

“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.”

WAIT A MINUTE!!!!!!!!! ENOUGH!

You confront the thief. “YOU WORK FOR ME! YOU SERVE ME! I do not live to serve you!” And then you say the words that send fear into the thief deeper than any fear he has ever known….

“WE THE PEOPLE…….”

It is here that I must stop, because I do not know what comes after this. As one person, alone, it is not up to me. Thank God it is not up to the thief!

It is up to the person, lying there in his own sweat, struggling to get his eyes open enough to turn on the light so he can see, fighting the shackles that have been placed on him in his sleep. Fortunately they are still loose enough…..

You are that person. We all are that person. And it is only you and I, “We the people” that can do those things necessary to put the thief back where he belongs.

It is you and I who can realize the power lies in us; certainly not in any political party. It is in those who give their trust to their chosen “parties”. But It is not Republicans or Democrats who can save us. They are merely tools. A hammer, if you will. But it is our hands that hold the handle. We have the strength, together, to exercise that hammer to do its work. To once again begin forging something of beauty out of the rubble.

And it is the wise man who knows to ask that same Creator, Who endowed us with these rights, to enable us to once again hear that bell of liberty, although cracked, ring loud and true that The United States Of America is once again truly the land of the free, if we the people will be brave….

… and just wake up.

AUTHOR: Kenny Clipner
kenneth.clipner@charter.net