Six Ways Our Government is Failing Us (Part 2)
Our forefathers fought a war in order to be able to establish the government they gave us. Our government is failing the American people by not doing what they created it for.
The purposes of our government are outlined in the Preamble to the Constitution. The first two purposes, in order to form a more perfect union and to establish justice, were covered in the first article,
The third purpose of our government is to insure [sic] domestic tranquility.
Tranquility is not a word you will hear to describe life in the United States. There is another word that was often used in the early days of our country to describe the people here. The Declaration of Independence used it when talking about this new government that they wanted to form. That word is happiness.
Our Founders established our government to promote the happiness of the American people, to see that our country lives in tranquility. Just to be clear. To be tranquil means to be “quiet; calm; undisturbed; peaceful; not agitated, free from disturbance or turmoil.
Our country has never been lass tranquil than it is right now, and there are two basic reasons for this. And both of them have their sources in government.
The first reason that our country is not tranquil, or happy, is that the political left, the Progressives, Democrats are trying to compel fundamental changes to our country. They insist that the United States, both now and throughout its history, has been, frankly, wrong. On what? Just about everything. And they are trying to change that.
But there are two problems here: The first is that, while the Founders would have welcomed a vigorous debate over the principles and values of our country, there is no debate, no discussion, no dialogue here. They feel that there is nothing to debate, discuss, or dialogue about. In fact, the Progressives, the left, the Democrats prefer to compel people to, if not agree, at least not oppose their ideals.
They do this in two ways: The first is that they will use the court system either to intimidate those who might oppose them or to essentially write laws that compel compliance with their views. The second way is through social activism, primarily mass protests, that attempts to shame those who disagree with them into compliance.
The second problem with the Democratic, leftist, Progressive agenda is that they deny the foundational principle of our country: that we are endowed by our creator with unalienable rights. That statement alone establishes that our country has a religious, specifically Christian, foundation. They insist that our nation has always been and was intended to be a secular nation.
But if we are a secular nation, then we don’t have unalienable rights. We only have such rights as the government allows us. And we have lost the foundation principle of our country, the one that makes / made us what we are, a unique nation.
While there are many particular issues in the left/Progressive/Democratic agenda, it is important to be aware of the underlying assumptions that guide it.
If an issue is divisive, or controversial, or contentious, it is not the place of the government to assume the high moral ground and decide for the people what it will do. The government gets its authority from the people. They have reversed that today. When the people have decided on an issue, then it’s time for the government to act.
One example here is Planned Parenthood. Abortion is certainly one of the most divisive issues in our country, yet the government insists on using millions of dollars of taxpayer money to fund it. This is not a case where the government is deriving its authority from the people.
In fairness to the Democrats, Progressives, the left, most of the issues that they talk about the most and insist most strongly on, they see as rights issues. And this will take a separate article to discuss fully.
Basically, they see the country as fundamentally flawed, and it requires a fundamental makeover to get it right, and it is not going willingly. So that is why they need to protest, riot, scream, and even get hostile and violent at times. It is all justified to get our country off the wrong track and onto the right one.
The left, Democrats, Progressives, reject the idea that our rights come from God and insist that the government provides them. And the very idea of rights changes when God is removed from this picture.
Our country was founded on unalienable rights given to us by God, and the Founders decided to list some of them in the Bill of Rights. They were all things that we could do without government intrusion and in some cases, protections that the government had to provide, as in court cases.
Now rights have become what the government must provide for people, whether citizens or not, and what people must do for other people, whether they want to or not. This is not the liberty our Founders had in mind when they established our country.
The right to freedom of speech must be curtailed if it infringes on a person’s right not to be offended. People have to give more of their money to government to give to those who have less.
Charity has always been a major part of American life, but it was always done voluntarily. Now the government has assumed that role and driven the country into unsustainable debt with almost no possibility of getting out of it. But that is for another article.
The second reason that our country is not happy or tranquil is that our government is more concerned about people who are not citizens of our country than those who are. This is not to say that these other people are not needier than our own citizens. But just as there are needier people in the world than my own children, my first responsibility is still to my own children. And our government exists to take care of its own people first. That’s why it was created. If it fails to do what it was intended to do, then we have the right to replace it, and our Founders expected that we would. That was why we replaced the English government of the colonies with one of our own creation. It was not looking out for our interests first.
Is it selfish, exploitive, discriminatory, and racist for our government to take care of our own citizens before considering the needs of other people in the world? No. Remember that our government gives more money in foreign aid than any other country in the world, a lot more.
When a mother takes care of her own children before other needy children, is she being selfish, exploitive, discriminatory, or racist? No. Is she supposed to look at all the needy children of the world and choose the most needy and focus her attention and resources on them before her own children? Again, no.
This is why God created mothers and fathers.. Children need an extraordinary level of care that is usually best provided by its birth parents. And our government exists for the same reason: to take care of its citizens. If the citizens want to do something for other people, they can, and they do. But that is not the government’s job, unless the people give it authority and direction to do so.
Domestic tranquility. The happiness of the people. The left, Progressives, Democrats will insist that we as a nation have deprived an ever-increasing number of people in this country of those very things, and they are best suited to remedy that problem. They believe it is past time for discussion, because we as a nation are too blind to see our own faults. Our prejudices are too ingrained, too inherent for any hope of change, so they, and our government, must force these changes on the American people.
Two very different visions of and for our country. Is there any way to bridge the two and bring peace again to our country?
The first and most important thing that we must do is to try to restore the vision of our Founders. The left, Progressives, Democrats will insist that they were flawed too and times have changed. The problem with that is that when you want to fundamentally change a country, you have essentially conquered it, just without all the death and destruction of a typical war. But that’s for the next article.
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