By Les Dunaway
Our elected representatives have, lately (and way past time) been criticized for writing laws that both did not and could not address the problem for which they were written and, at the same time, created yet more problems.
I am altogether confident that part of the problem is that of our representatives being less competent at fulfilling the duties of their office than at convincing their constituents to elect, and re-elect, them. However, I am even more confident that those failings are not new, as any student, however casual, of history or the Bible knows.
I believe that the major cause of these calamities, and calamities they are, causing endless suffering in both the physical and financial senses are rooted in our government venturing into areas for which it is unsuited and was never intended.
The men who gathered in Philadelphia, in the summer of 1787, were students of human nature and of the evils of government. They were successful men; men who’d accomplished things in a difficult time; accomplished sufficiently, and in such a way, for their neighbors, who had known them all their lives, to trust them to do right.
They would not have, could not have, designed a system which was concerned with who is in your bed or how you spend your money or what you believe in either a spiritual or political sense. Indeed, they expected and valued the differences in values and goals that define any society.
They would have taken personal and forceful exception to attacks on their faith and their honor which have, lately, become commonplace. Therefore, the government with which we are now burdened cannot be what was envisioned in that sweaty gathering in the Philadelphia State House.
This view can be substantiated by even the most cursory reading of the document, unique in the history of man and a model for people across the world who yearn for freedom, which they created. For, such a cursory reading cannot find any justification for most of the preoccupations of today’s American government.
One of those men, Thomas Jefferson, wrote to another of them, James Madison,
“I hold it, that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical. Unsuccessful rebellions, indeed, generally establish the encroachments on the rights of the people, which have produced them. An observation of this truth should render honest republican governors so mild in their punishment of rebellions, as not to discourage them too much. It is a medicine necessary for the sound health of government.”
Given the state of our nation, perhaps it is one of those times.
Happily, the same document that is now attacked by many, provides for those “little rebellions” every two years. The very mechanism which some would pull down protects them by allowing resort to the ballot box rather than the cartridge box.