Issue 31.14
The founders of our country did not create the Principles of Freedom. They learned what those principles were by studying, discussing, pondering and even arguing about concepts written down over centuries. They considered whether individuals should be treated equally or if there were special classes (nobility, royalty, commoners, etc.) that should receive different treatment based on birth or lineage. They considered whether people should have opportunity to change their situation in life or should be consigned to remain economically and societally where they were born. Most importantly, they considered whether people should be strongly controlled to maintain order and safety or if people should be given as much freedom as possible to choose their lives and loves and passions unless those choices infringed upon others.
They studied great philosophers, scientists and thinkers such as Plato, Cicero, Plutarch, Gibbons, John Locke, Frederik Bastiat, Shakespeare, Alexander Pope, Moliere, Demosthenes and many others. Montesquieu is credited with drawing concepts from ancient Greece and Rome as well as the Magna Carta and English law. He formulated the concept of checks and balances in a three part government – Executive, Legislative and Judicial. From these thinkers, the Founders gathered, not only the ideas that would form their concepts of a new way of organizing and governing a people, but many of the ideas that helped them design a system that could counter-balance the natural tendency for governments to take freedoms away to serve the interests of the “governors” or the need for public safety. Many do not know that they also borrowed from the Iriquois Confederacy (a league of American Indian tribes) for many of the ideas in the Constitution. These basic concepts had kept the American Natives in that area productive, peaceful and happy for about 400 years before the Europeans overwhelmed them with massive immigration and colonization.
The result of their study and thought was a Constitution that has regulated our government and affairs for over 200 years. Along with the Bill of Rights (the first 10 Amendments added to that document), it created a system never seen by the “civilized” world of European, Asian and African countries. It quickly allowed America to become home to the most successful, wealthy, free and happy general population in the world. It sparked movements in many nations to adopt the concepts that led to such success and freedom for the common man. It is not the Constitution that is the key to these positive outcomes however. It is understanding and applying the principles of freedom that it protects and enshrines.
“We, the people”, are responsible for determining whether or not those principles will continue to govern our lives or if we will surrender them to special interests, corporatism and political parties that want power and advantage at the expense of the rest of society. Lincoln began his powerful address at Gettysburg with these words, “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”
Today, we are facing an equal challenge – deciding if we are content to let special interests destroy those freedoms and that liberty by changing or ignoring that Constitution. Are we willing to inform ourselves, get involved, require the faithfulness and fidelity of our elected representatives and vote for principles and people that promote and protect our liberty and our children’s futures? That is the question each of us must answer today.
Lynn West is a thinker, a teacher and a patriot. You can reach him through email at forgingthefuture2021@gmail.com or through this newspaper. Liberty is a state of being which must be continually created. These articles can help all of us discover the ways we can contribute to that outcome.