Posted on 12/01/2012 5:21:08 AM PST by IbJensen
"When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another ..."
So begins the Declaration of Independence of the 13 colonies from the king and country to which they had given allegiance since the settlers first came to Jamestown and Plymouth Rock.
The declaration was signed by 56 angry old white guys who had had enough of what the Cousins were doing to them. In seceding from the mother country, these patriots put their lives, fortunes and honor on the line.
Four score and five years later, 11 states invoked the same right "to dissolve the political bands" of the Union and form a new nation. After 620,000 had perished, the issue of a state's right to secede was settled at Appomattox. If that right had existed, it no longer did.
What are we to make, then, of petitions from 25,000 citizens of each of seven Southern states — 116,000 from Texas alone — to secede?
While no one takes this movement as seriously as men took secession in 1861, the sentiments behind it ought not to be minimized. For they bespeak a bristling hostility to the federal government and a dislike bordering on detestation of some Americans for other Americans, as deep as it was on the day Beauregard's guns fired on Fort Sumter.
Our Pledge of Allegiance still speaks of "one nation under God, indivisible," but that is far from the reality in the America of 2012.
The social, cultural, moral and political revolutions of the 1960s, against which Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan inveighed to win their 49-state triumphs, have now captured half of the country.
One America believes our history is a catalog of crimes against people of color, that women have an inviolable right to abortions, that condoms should be handed out to sexually active teens in schools where Darwinism should be taught as revealed truth, while Bibles, prayers and religious symbols should be permanently expelled.
The other America sees all this as unpatriotic, godless and decadent.
One America believes in equality of rights; the other demands equality of results brought about through the redistribution of income and wealth, affirmative action, racial and gender set-asides, and quotas.
One America believes in gun control; the other in gun rights.
Now that Christmas and Easter have been expunged from public schools and the public square and the popular culture has been thoroughly de-Christianized, we Americans seem to have but one holy day of obligation that brings us all together: Super Bowl Sunday.
Where one America divinizes diversity, the other seeks out our lost unity and community. Half the country pays no federal income taxes, but half depends on federal benefits.
The occasions when we come together as one, as after 9/11 and during natural disasters such as Katrina and Sandy, seem few and farther between, and the resurrected unity rarely lasts.
Could today's America come together to build an interstate highway system or send astronauts to the moon, as we did just seven years after John Glenn first orbited the Earth?
Environmentalists would have killed Ike's highway system and the Hoover and Grand Coulee dams, as today they seek to stop the fracking for oil and natural gas and block the Keystone XL pipeline.
As for states seceding, however, is that really a solution to national disintegration? Tens of millions with Blue State mindsets live in Red State America, and vice versa. While folks in Texas may talk of seceding from the Union, folks in Austin talk of seceding from Texas.
Yet we should take seriously what is behind this desire to separate and sever ties, for it mirrors what is happening across our civilization.
The West is decomposing.
British Tories seek to cut ties to the European Union. Scots want to leave Britain. Catalans vote to divorce from Spain, to which they have been wedded since the 15th century. Flemish talk of leaving Walloons behind in Belgium. Northern Europeans are weary of carrying their profligate southern brethren and muse about cutting Greece adrift and letting it float out into the Mediterranean.
And Americans are already seceding from one another — ethnically, culturally, politically. Middle-class folks flee high-tax California, as Third World immigrants, legal and illegal, pour in to partake of the cornucopia of social welfare benefits the Golden Land dispenses.
High-tax states like New York now send tens of thousands of pension checks to Empire State retirees in tax-free Florida. Communities of seniors are rising that look like replicas of the suburbs of the 1950s. People gravitate toward their own kind. Call it divorce, American-style.
What author William Bishop called "The Big Sort" — the sorting out of people by political beliefs — proceeds. Eighteen states have gone Democratic in six straight presidential elections. A similar number have gone Republican.
"Can we all just get along?" asked Rodney King during the Los Angeles riot of 1992. Well, if we can't, we can at least dwell apart.
After all, it's a big country.
“IMHO, what is needed is a civilian militia consisting of law abiding citizens...all nut jobs and looney tune’s disallowed.”
And who, pray, gets to determine who is a “nut job” and a “looney tune?” Would a nut job be someone who has tattoos? Would a looney tune be someone whose religious tenets include the belief that Jesus Christ visited North America?
I like your idea of a civilian militia (which we already have, as propounded by the Founders), but it would be an anarchical body unless all were accepted, warts and tattoos and strange religious rites and all.
As long as the civilian militia subscribes to the ideals set forth in the Constitution, and that the militia’s primary (yea, SOLE purpose) is to protect that compact and return it to its meaning, the more welcomed into that militia, the better.
What is legal now may not be later. Laws and how they’re enforced change. For example, before and after the Nuremberg laws of 1935.
“The battle for freedom is not far off. If we have the will to be free.”
Agreed.
I am unreconstructed, as were my ancestors.
I will draw my last breath resisting subjection.
I am still going through the motions because there isn't anything better to do. But I no longer hold out much hope for a quiet future. Even with republicans in charge we are headed for disaster because they keep appeasing the left.
The best hope is for the red and blue states to part company, but too many people are still in denial.
We are about to run out of quarters and when the music stops we're going to make Greece look like a high school debate club.
Some eyes in TX are open.
I admire and envy my spunky neighbors in OK. The State where Obozo did not carry a single county in 2008.
My brother tells me that we need not worry about TX being invaded from DC, they have to get throught OK first. hee hee hee
When I refer to nut jobs, I'm speaking of the folks that constantly run around spouting off nonsense such as, FEMA camps gonna gas us, oh my gosh, the body bags are in and they are prepared to use them.
Chem trails, fluoride in the water, micro chips...micro chips. 911 was an inside job, Obozo’s satan...and the like.
You know the type. There's a conspiracy behind every bush, the worlds gonna end on the mayan calender, we all came from aliens visiting from planet quasar nepton brownstar 9.
We have more important issues that concern our nation, our well being, our future than to cloud with what seems to be endless conspiracy theories.
I’m thinking I’m liking OK.
>>Many of us have given our word to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.<<
Unlike the new RINO, Saxbee Chambliss, that oath is honored today because it has no expiration date. Things change, but your word is permanent.
>>We’re going to have to take a defensive stand sooner or later. The time is now.<<
I disagree; defense is for losers. It is time to be agressive. Stand up to LIBs everywhere; mock them, it’ll drive them nuts. Talk up impeachment; talk up secession.
BTW, the secession question is NOT settled and Appomatox was time out!
Deo vindice
“IMHO, what is needed is a civilian militia consisting of law abiding citizens”
From what I’ve heard they’re already numbering in the hundreds of thousands in the Southern and Western states and growing.
I agree with your criticism of the term ‘defensive’.
It’s very clear that our government is our enemy. No politician, save Rand Paul, is talking about dismembering the central socialist government. A proper American president (I refuse to believe this lying phony in the White Hut is an American) would have put an immediate freeze on hiring and would have begun to eliminate much of what is regulating the hell out of us.
“I am unreconstructed, as were my ancestors. I will draw my last breath resisting subjection.”
You and me both, brother.
The best offense is a good defense.
Regarding Texas’s spunky neighbors in Oklahoma, if we secede together we could be called the Republic of Texoma. Anyway, here is my vision for a new constitution:
http://freetexasconstitution.wordpress.com/
See the sidebar for answers to objections to secession.
The day Americans walk into a grocery store and there are no groceries?
Yup. They say, "Keep Austin weird." I say, "Keep the weird in Austin."
Perhaps.
My lil ol pinion....destruction of the 2nd amendment via the U.N., executive order, through the supreme court, legislation.
Lose the 2nd amendment, lose your freedom.
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