Excellent post loveliberty2, but is it too late? Are the principles and ideals that those great men stood for no longer of importance to our hedonistic, narcis'sistic, nihil'istic nation? More Americans can name the siblings of "Snooki" than they could the Founders.
Am I giving up? My signature answers that.
I still don’t know what a Snooki is. lol.
Let's attempt to put our little time on this earth into some perspective, as it has to do with the history of liberty, and whether it is too late for a revival of the ideas of liberty in America.
In all of the history of civilization, forms of people/government relationships had come and gone. For most of time, ordinary people were in some kind of servitude to others, in a government over people relationship. Sometimes the tyranny was by one person, as in master/slave, and sometimes it was king over subjects. Sometimes it was some other form.
Let's imagine our recent ancestors as having crossed an ocean in crude boats to live in a wilderness using equally crude tools to carve out a place to dwell. All of us are subjects of a King in a foreign land.
We might have dreamed of freedom, of living with hope and opportunity and plenty, but what would have been our prospects?
In all the preceding thousands of years, no one had devised a system of government which allowed for that to happen. Might we have thought it was "too late" for us?
Nowhere had there been an example of anything like what happened in 1776 and 1787 in America.
Suddenly, a people had expressed in a written document (the Declaration of Independence) ideas so revolutionary that a totally unique form of government came into being. A people declared their rights were derived from a Creator, one of whose manifestations was through the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God, as Supreme Judge of the World, and overseer of the affairs of men (Divine Providence).
Through a period of revolution they had asserted their inalienable rights to be free, and within 11 years, they perfected their quest for freedom in a form of self-government by their written Constitution which turned upside-down all previous people/government forms. It left individuals free, and it limited the powers of those they elected to serve them.
Their idea, unique and special, made it a Creator over People over Government relationship, with government being the servant of the People, and all of it relying on Creator-endowed rights, liberty, and laws to protect that liberty.
Too late now? Only if we forget the Founders' repeated acknowledgement of the role of Divine Providence during America's years between 1620 and 1787, even beyond that.
After all, we do not have to come up with the ideas, as they did. All we have to do is rediscover them and assert our Creator-endowed rights to select people who will reflect the Founders' principles in their decisions in government.