America’s state of the union
The brute fact of the state of our union is alarming! According to Catherine Engelbrecht of True the Vote, the underlying cause of our national strife is not hard to detect — a lawless, selfish grab of power for power’s sake that has used the ballot box as an opportunity to manipulate the most sacred right of our democracy for unmerited gain.
If true, then many of our present woes devolve from this unprecedented deceit. It has taken Ms. Engelbrecht and a foreign-born filmmaker to unmask the truth of electioneering using what law enforcement uses daily in the course of criminal detection—cell-phone technology. Perhaps now our eyes are open to what they see as a brazen and massive assault on the most sacred right of our Republic, the right to vote in free, fair, and secure elections.
Sir Walter Scott said it best, "Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive!” A tangled web likely now beginning to unravel.
Today’s unprecedented censorship of free speech is a stunning betrayal of the American Creed, and the fine point is this, more alarming than the loss of liberty—the divine gift our Founders said government should protect—is the tragic loss of the love of liberty. This is the sacred fire that George Washington spoke of in his first inaugural address, which theme President Kennedy referred to in his famous inaugural line of the torch passing “to a new generation.” If this relay of passing the sacred fire of liberty is broken, we will no longer be that “shining city on a hill” that John Winthrop spoke of standing on the flagship Arbella on its maiden voyage to America’s verdant shores, but instead a sad “story and a by-word through the world” that Winthrop warned against. And should that happen, that new generation is left in Winston Churchill’s words “without any sense of definition or direction”—a people vulnerable to caprice not reason.
We turn to Abraham Lincoln for direction and find in his 1862 Annual Message to Congress wise counsel: “The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present,” he wrote. “The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.”
To disenthrall is to free oneself from bondage. In our case, from the bondage of illicit alliances that dishonor the sacred fire of liberty.
Cameron S. Brown is president of the Kalamazoo Abraham Lincoln Institute and a former Michigan State Senator. Follow him at www.HistoryFrontiers.blog.
This article originally appeared on Sturgis Journal: Opinion
