"Posterity, you will never know how much it cost the present generation to preserve your freedom. I hope you will make good use of it. If you do not, I shall repent in heaven that ever I took half the pains to preserve it." -John Adams
Welcome to Patriot's Lament. We strive here to educate ourselves on Liberty. We will not worry ourselves so much with the daily antics of American politics, and drown ourselves in the murky waters of the political right or left.
Instead, we will look to the Intellectuals and Champions of Liberty, and draw on their wisdom of what it is to be a truly free people. We will learn from where our Providential Liberties are derived, and put the proper perspective of a Free Individual and the State.
Please join us!
The really odd dynamic, as a Christian homeschooler, was that a surprising number of people home schooled their children because the government schools were insufficiently nationalistic. There is a big move to transition to a world government and the government schools are part of that, but the response of becoming a more intense worshipper of the nation state isn't the solution. As with so much, "conservatives" think an earlier, less acute, stage of the disease is health.
ReplyDeleteThe tie in to the above is to imagine how much shorter that trip would be if Christian parents taught their children that ours is a heavenly kingdom, and we're ambassadors, not citizens. We obey as a courtesy, to preserve our witness, not out of the obligation to the state as our master.
Jim in Kenai
I've always said that if you want to change the world; have as many children as God will bless you with, home educate them (school is bad whether public, private, or home), and spread the Gospel.
ReplyDeleteSpreading the Gospel is easier if your quiver is full of arrows.
Psalm 127
Your quiver is not full if (1) you don't have any arrows or (2) your arrows are not in your quiver.
PS: Not everyone is called to have a quiver, but if you are, make sure you have arrows and keep them in your quiver.
Good comments both!
ReplyDeleteI happen to have a quiver full myself plus one. (8)
All of them are my arrows. :-)
Gary North has a great article about how we're stalled until there is a consistent telling of history from the conservative/libertarian viewpoint, showing causality. Everyone is taught the progressive view of history which describes progress as the centralization of authority and increasing management of the herd.
ReplyDeleteThere are revisionist tellings of pieces of history, but it is still footnotes and addendum on history as told by the victors (those who consolidated power after secession from England, and then didn't look back as they continued to recreate the English system, but with themselves in the seats of power and graft).
Excerpts (will have to spread across a couple of posts):
"I think this is indicative of the weakness intellectually of the conservative movement in general, and the Christian conservative movement specifically. Until this basic grunt work is completed, and completed by somebody who is competent academically, but also gifted in terms of his ability to persuade a targeted audience of this position, the conservative movement and the libertarian movement will continue to operate on the fringes of American society.
As for the Christian conservatives, they are in even worse shape. People who have grown up as conservatives or libertarians have spent their entire lives mentally reconsidering some of the treasured myths of American history. The Christian conservatives have barely rethought anything. They are advocates of the myths that have been taught to them in the public school textbooks. Even if they attended a Christian day school, the textbooks that were assigned to them were basically baptized versions of the public school textbooks. They are far less aware of the degree to which conventional textbook accounts of everything are a pack of lies. They have to rethink everything, and nobody wants to do this.
Another problem is this: the parents have so completely imbibed the mythology of modern liberal humanism that they would regard a revisionist account of American history as some kind of commie plot. What? The Constitutional convention was a coup d'état? The Anti-Federalists were right? The Articles of Confederation promoted liberty? Why, that is like saying that Patrick Henry was lying through his teeth when he said that the British government was a tyranny, when the only other government on the face of the earth that was freer was in Switzerland? What are we to believe, that the young men of the American Revolution were in open rebellion against the second freest society on the face of the earth? Never let it be!
ReplyDeleteSometimes a person finally comes to its senses. If you ask a student who has just read Patrick Henry's "give me liberty or give me death" speech to name the country in 1776 which was freer than Great Britain, the student, being ignorant of everything in general historically, would not be able to name one. He probably would not even remember Switzerland. But at least he would not be able to name one.
Then he is assigned a term paper to identify those countries where liberty was in greater abundance than Great Britain in 1776. The student would find out very rapidly that there was no such country, other than Switzerland. Then, the teacher could ask the student: "Was Patrick Henry telling the truth?" The answer is obvious: he was lying through is revolutionary teeth. He was lying to get into power politically, which he could not do under the existing political system.
That was true of all of them. They wanted political power, and they wanted the power to tax. But others got there first. So, they wanted out. And so, as soon as they were out, they drastically raised taxes on everybody, they inflated the currency, and they built up massive federal debts.
Since 1788, the U.S. government has lived without debt for just one year: 1837. We have never regained the freedoms that we had in 1776. We have paid more in taxes, we have put up with more inflation, and we have put up with more bureaucracy that could have been imagined in 1776.
If you tell this to the average conservative, he thinks true are off your rocker. You are not off your rocker. You have finally come to grips with the fact that the victors write the textbooks.
The definition of patriotism is always established by the victors of the battles which led up to control by the present establishment.
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So when Randy just flat out doesn't get it, it is because his entire worldview was framed by the WW2/Cold War experience viewed through the version of history he was taught in school. If I were a few years older I'd be in his shoes.
Jim in Kenai
Randy doesn't just not get it. I feel that he is more sinister than that, but I don't think he knows he is. He has recently stated if he was in charge, all children in this state would be REQUIRED to take an oath of allegiance to the state of Alaska.
ReplyDeleteReminds me of the oath of loyalty that the early colonies would require of their peasants. The ones that the quakers refused and were horsewhipped for not taking the oath. The only option that Randy logically has for his oath would be to shoot those who would refuse in the head. What other option is there? The state is a monopolistic power of violence, bow or die. I am personally a fan of Henry. I do think he was a revolutionary. I also think, that as we look at 1776 as 2012 americans, I truly believe that there were those patriots of Liberty that believed, even if they were the freest of nations(England), that they still lived in tyranny. "Conceived in Liberty" in my reading of it, shows that they did live in tyranny, by their standards. By ours? 6 pence tax on 100 acres that you didn't own? Not bad! But, when it was raised to a penny an acre, the people rebelled and threw out the governors, time and time again, even though he was the "rightful" owner? I don't think that they were more free than we are, I think we are less free than they were.