Cameron Brown: Chaos or community

Upon the adoption of the Missouri Compromise allowing the 24th state to join the Union as a slave state, Thomas Jefferson penned these words: “... This momentous question, like a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union.”

A three-alarm firebell sounds today over the frightening invasion on our southern border, over unsustainable federal spending with a debt load of $33 trillion, and over the existential threat posed by the Communist Chinese Party. Added to this is the aberrant weaponization of the nation’s top law enforcement agencies against its own citizens. Left unchecked, any one of these will be the death knell of the America we know and love. Jefferson’s premonition nearly came true. It took the determined and steadfast but untested leadership of a roughhewn prairie lawyer to save the nation. And lest we forget, the political elite of his day thought he was unfit to be president.

A dramatic course correction is needed today drawn from the same wellspring of devotion that sprang from the heart of our 16th president. Nobel laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has given the world a keen perspective forged in the crucible of a torturous Russian gulag. In his “Templeton Address,” he said, “... if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: ‘Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened.’” Solzhenitsyn’s authoritative voice affirms a love of God and country is foundational for a grounded and just government. Once the twin pillars of our patriotism, have they now been jettisoned in the rush to marginalize America’s exceptionalism? The world desperately needs a strong America true to its founding creed. There is no other replacement on the world stage.

A year before an assassin took his life, Martin Luther King Jr., authored the book, “Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?” Its message speaks truth today, if only for the aptness of the book’s title. Nations and empires fall — the Roman Republic, the British Empire, Ancient Greece. None ever achieved the acclaim of being “the last best hope of earth” as Lincoln aptly called America. But America teeters on the brink, and many Americans are lost to the truth of just how this is happening or that it is happening at all. Our Founders did not bequeath to us a republic whose blessings of freedom and liberty are set in perpetual motion because they established an unparalleled constitution. These blessings are ensured only to the extent that we honor and uphold the Constitution. The guarantee is in the stewardship of our fidelity to the Constitution and from that act of devotion, liberty flows and freedom rings.

The call to greatness has always been in the very heart and soul of America. It is there because of the sacrifice of our Founders. Washington had it. Lincoln had it. We must anchor ourselves to that foundation of our patriotism rooted in the principle of God-given rights. Once we do that, we can pave the way for a resurgence of that national strength and purpose the world hungers to see.

— Cameron S. Brown is president of the Kalamazoo Abraham Lincoln Institute and a former Michigan state senator. Follow him at HistoryFrontiers.blog.

This article originally appeared on The Holland Sentinel: Cameron Brown: Chaos or community