Thursday, May 5, 2011

What Does America Need?


America needs knowledge.  If someone asked you to pilot the ship of state through rough waters, wouldn’t you want to know a few things?  Where are we coming from? Where are we going?  What methods of getting there have worked in the past?  What methods haven’t?  Is there any essential difference between then and now? 

America needs to know the answers to these questions and most of us don’t. Very few of us have any idea of the importance of our Constitution, which is both anchor and ballast.  Our ignorance invites our enemies to disconnect us from our anchor and see it as merely a quaint antique.  So many of us are ignorant of the mass of historic evidence that shows the Constitution to be the most brilliant and applicable of human documents.  We need the historic knowledge to discern the difference between societies that function well enough to give its individuals life, liberty and the opportunity to pursue happiness.

Americans need to remember who we are.  We are the people who wrote the Constitution, who studied the governments of the past and designed a vessel that would do far more than just float.  We need to remember the Constitution’s main purpose – to limit government’s encroachment into our private and public decisions.  This ship is designed to give us the chance to go wherever we want to go in life; not to either force or nudge us into a trip we don’t want to take. 

This ship was both organized and powered by capitalism – the only system that allows for us all to go our own way and still arrive at prosperity.  This may be the 21st century, but nothing about human nature has changed; our tendency to grab for power, and for that power to rot even our best attributes, is still with us.  We may have the internet, cell phones and jets, but we still can be lazy if it pays to and now success can get us sent to the brig.

The wind of incentives has died and we are becalmed in a stagnant sea surrounded by sharks.  The ballast has mostly leaked out.  A mutiny is brewing in spite of the captain’s promises.  We need to know what we are doing.  It’s not OK to be ignorant.                                        D Chadwell                                                

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