“In no country in Europe has the great social revolution that I have just described [democracy & social equality] made such rapid progress as in France; but it has always advanced without guidance. The heads of the state have made no preparation for it, and it has advanced without their consent or without their knowledge. The most powerful, the most intelligent, and the most moral classes of the nation have never attempted to control it in order to guide it. Democracy has consequently been abandoned to its wild instincts, and it has grown up like those children who have no parental guidance, who receive their education in the public streets, and who are acquainted only with the vices and wretchedness of society. Its existence was seemingly unknown when suddenly it acquired supreme power. All then servilely submitted to its caprices; it was worshiped as the idol of strength; and when afterwards it was enfeebled by its own excesses, the legislator conceived the rash project of destroying it, instead of instructing it and correcting its vices.”
It strikes me Tocqueville is describing the course and the fate of the 0bama revolution we see sweeping through the American polity, as though he possessed a glass permitting him to gaze from his day to this day. But, many have observed that particular talent residing in this amazing Frenchman.
In the movie Gettysburg there is a scene where a hard-bitten, red-headed sergeant of the Union Army and Gen. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain come across a frightened slave on a deserted battlefield. They pick him up, determine that he is unhurt, send him on his way, and fall into a conversation about freedom and equality. During the course of that conversation the sergeant observes that he is not fighting for equality, but for the opportunity to prove himself “the better man.” That is the nut of the issue. I don’t know if such a conversation ever took place between Gen Chamberlain and one of his NCOs, or if it is a story made of whole cloth, but it is a perfect summation of the American Spirit that Tocqueville so wonderfully describes in his incomparable treatise. It is a spirit that 0bama, and those of his ilk, will never understand, and that men and women such as Frank and Pelosi dare not allow to flourish, for it is a fatal poison to their ambitions.
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My husband and I have been students of the Civil War since both of us were teenagers (I daresay more than forty years ago). Joshua Chamberlain has fascinated us perhaps more than any other participant in that war. One of our most prized possessions is a copy of the book ‘Maine at Gettysburg’, published in 1898, from Chamberlain’s personal library. It is inscribed with his handwritten signature on the first page, ‘Joshua L. Chamberlain, Bvt. Maj. Gen. U.S.A.’
In that book is recorded, among many other fascinating recollections of Maine’s participation at Gettysburg, General Chamberlain’s address at the dedication of the 20th Maine monument in October of 1889, a portion of which follows:
On great deeds something abides. On great fields something stays. Forms change and pass; bodies disappear; but spirits linger, to consecrate ground for the vision-place of souls. And reverent men and women from afar, and generations that know us not and that we know not of, heart-drawn to see where and by whom great things were suffered and done for them, shall come to this deathless field, to ponder and dream; and lo! The shadow of a mighty presence shall wrap them in its bosom, and the power of the vision pass into their souls.
This is the great reward of service. To live, far out and on, in the life of others; this is the mystery of the Christ – to give life’s best for such high sake that it shall be found again unto life eternal.
The situation in which our beloved republic finds herself in early 2009 is tragic beyond comprehension. Some believe the real tragedy lies in the fact that those who played the major role in causing our downfall are now claiming the moral right to author self-serving ‘solutions’ of their own making. They are like an adult child, having administered small doses of arsenic to his mother over a period of time, sitting by her bedside in the hospital, shoving a myriad of papers at her as she lays dying, and demanding that she sign over everything she owns to him, so that he can find her a better doctor.
But as evil as that egregious circumstance is, it pales in comparison to our leadership’s desecration of those about whom Chamberlain spoke.
Hundreds of thousands of Americans, from the last part of the eighteenth century through the first part of the twenty-first, have voluntarily laid down their lives in the name of liberty. I daresay that all of those hundreds of thousands of Americans placed more value on allegiance and duty than any of those now in leadership in Washington.
We know almost none of their names, and yet they purchased with their lives the freedoms that ensured that we transform, with a sense of historically unprecedented conviction, thirteen beleaguered colonies into Ronald Reagan’s shining city on a hill.
And now, fewer than six hundred self-serving scoundrels, incapable of comprehending the powerful measure of love and devotion that wells up within the heart of an American patriot, have succeeded in stealing that precious, hard-won inheritance and turning it into something black, dimensionless, and without a soul. And they are seeing to it that there will be no turning back. Expanding their base. Answering mightily to their special interests. Demonizing, even silencing, their opposition.
And we have no one but the American citizen to blame. His apathy. Ignorance. Self-centeredness. Ingratitude. Hedonism. The fewer than six hundred were placed into power by a band of adoring mental adolescents, who simply want to be allowed to go to the mall, download music/noise, and worship celebrity.
The mall/noise/celebrity fountain will continue to pour forth, while the nuts and bolts of a free society, faith in the Almighty, the sanctity of individual liberty, the concept of personal responsibility, and the belief in reward for thrift, ingenuity and hard work, are being cast aside in deference to gods who are nothing more than the creation of evil men.
The American patriot knows that He expects His followers to hold fast to His teachings, but He does not always promise us earthly victories. More importantly, He prepares a place for His believers, where joy and glory are eternal, and the heartache and pain that the evil of this world creates will become nothing more than a faded memory of a time when men believed they reigned supreme.
~ joanie