Despite Prudence’ writings over the past 8 years, the nation has not adjusted to the models of governance and behavior she has carefully laid out. Upon the election of the odd Joe Biden and his basically anti-American administration, irritating, family and society-weakening tendencies have become policies, however illegitimately. Now, they’re crises – crises that threaten the survival of our nation and of Freedom, itself. Like the heart of Socialism in every sense, it derives from the avoidance of responsibility.
People say things like, “it’s a new day,” or “Times have changed.” Except “times” haven’t changed, people have. They’ve – we’ve – been taught new ideas to believe, habits to adopt, pleasures to revel in. We can look to a sudden change upon the murder of President John Kennedy. Most likely, the purpose of that assassination was political, not cultural. Kennedy had created powerful personal and political enemies. The abrupt change in culture and morals was an inadvertent one. Lyndon Johnson became president, federal civil rights legislation moved to center stage, for right reasons, but its adoption was made possible by the crassest political calculations. Inadvertently, for some but not all, the Civil Rights bill shifted morality into the metastasizing businesses of the federal administrative state and the court, where it has become enforced amorality.
Prior to the ‘60s, change in living standards and integration was happening due to improvements in individual beliefs in better moral codes… not fast enough, by a long shot, but improvement and progress were being made. The Civil Rights Act and the movement that brought it to fruition, inadvertently changed the nature of federal moral enforcement, even as it made long-overdue corrections to discrimination and segregation. Part of the federal “corrections” included elements of the “Great Society,” which federalized welfare and began the application of laws differently for different groups. This process, in all of its corrupt and socialist pieces, has rendered the federal government a soft tyrant which is hardening daily, while providing $Trillions of support for sub-tyrannies throughout the administrative state, particularly in Education.
Under the Constitution, the only moral adjustments can and should be made through equal justice: Equal protection under the law / equal application of the law. That canary escaped with the passage of the Great Society. Otherwise, our system works only if the vast majority of our citizens and residents share basic morals and mores, a claim that can no longer be made. Every institution that could reinforce the moral strength of our people, including schools and churches, are either hell-bent in the opposite direction, or bending a knee to popular immorality. For shame.
Freedom isn’t freedom without responsibility, it’s mere licentiousness. As responsibility began evaporating in the 1960’s, leftists accelerated, as part of civil rights and the Great society, their domination of public education and colleges of education, themselves. Like Mao’s “Long March,” it has taken decades – well-paid decades – to convert the role of education from conveyance of language, culture, skills, morals and history to our youth, to one of separation by race, class and, incredibly, gender. Everything happening fulfills the Communist Manifesto: separation from God and from Responsibility.
Churches and liturgies have proven to be much weaker than the years of bygone sacrifices to hold to and establish those faith communities would indicate. Just count the rainbow flags that some churches think override the teachings that brought them this far. They are proving every day that it is nearly impossible to convince others of ideas you, yourself, don’t believe. Simple economics can’t take the place of shared moral goodness.
America has been under moral attack for 60 years at a higher intensity than during its first 170 years. As the lessons of Genesis make clear, God’s Word (or, if you find that term more offensive than child abuse) moral truths, are always under attack here on Earth. Christianity has long been the primary target of such opposition, both from within and without.
For centuries those attacks tended to fail because the engine of responsibility kept working. People still, for the most part, paid the price for their own follies and failures. That is, until socialism replaced monarchy. Evil men – almost always men – grasped socialist ideas as a better way to control nations, economies and armies, but they ultimately fell: their bases were evil and so counter to human nature that they became insane. There has never been a government that created for itself political defenses that not only protected amorality and immorality, but learned to erode morality and, specifically, responsibility by individuals. Not until the U. S. federal (and state) administrative states. They’ve made a lot of “progress,” but they are “Progressives” by their own description. It has taken 60 years of “re-education” to bring us to an America facing the corrosive issues we do today.
What are the parameters of responsibility in matters of conception, pregnancy, abortion and birth?
Since the ‘60s we have replaced marriage as the cultural norm, with contraception, abortion, “hooking up,” and fatherless children. Responsibility has shifted to federal and state welfare programs. Women have become convinced that they need not choose a decent, committed and loving man who will provide for his family and children, and who will be in their lives through puberty and into adulthood – and this all before having sex! All they need is the sperm… and other men when they feel like it. It is the destruction of the American family and of children – especially boys: our vote-buying tax dollars of destruction, at work.
Along with hyper-sexualization of grade school children, lewd “Pride” parades and filth in school libraries, the left appears to be obsessed with fornication for “all genders.” To Democrats and other anti-Christian groups, fornication is a “right” as important to freedom as the First Amendment and all the rest. Except, without responsibility, it’s not a freedom at all. Enter abortion “rights.” Except abortion never was a “right,” per se; democratic decisioning at the state level is the “right” our Constitution guarantees.
What are the parameters of responsibility in matters of guns, ownership, self-defense and crime?
Gun owners quote the phrase, “… the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” It is part of the Second Amendment. Some like to ignore the stuff about the “A well regulated Militia…” But, as they may also choose to ignore, the amendment goes on to qualify the concept of a “militia,” as follows: “… being necessary to the security of a free State, …” Above all, the Bill of Rights amendments and their wordings are intensely Prudent in their purposes of preventing a tyrannical central government. Guaranteeing individual armament is crucial to that purpose. Clearly, by simple inference, mindful of why the Constitution was drafted and mindful of the horrendous sacrifices needed to permit its creation, is it not obvious that arming the FEDERAL GOVERNMENT had nothing whatsoever to do with the second amendment?
The only “militias” in the new nation’s experience were those formed by local communities and others to fight off the central government, perceived to be tyrannical toward the colonies. This aspect is never, ever acknowledged by that same federal government. Yes, gun ownership is crucial to individual self-defense, which that same federal – and some states’ – governments appear to discourage, if not deny, to its citizens, even as those governments purposely abdicate their contracted role of public safety. Had the British monarch established today’s same failed public policies, the justification for overturning his authority would have been far more popular.
There is a high expectation of responsibility for Constitutionally legal gun owners. As a definable demographic, legal gun owners are the least source of crime and, by far, the least source of crimes involving firearms. Yet this same group is always the target for restriction whenever a mentally or criminally defective person commits a “mass” shooting. Individual shootings and murders by gang members and drug dealers are of no particular concern to those who attack the rights of legal gun owners.
Maybe the concept of “militia” for legal gun owners is one that should be developed – not by any government, but by gun owners, themselves. “Whoa,” you might be saying. “That sounds like a mechanism for insurrection.”
Well, it’s not, but that threat should ALWAYS be on the mind of the Executive departments, and on the minds of voters. Sadly, and our own faults, the Congress should have it at top of mind, as well. Americans have the RIGHT to replace a tyrannical government with a representative one. One bright light – President Biden – during a press conference on gun control, uttered these non-sequiturs:
“Those who say the blood of lib- — ‘the blood of patriots,’ you know, and all the stuff about how we’re going to have to move against the government. Well, the tree of liberty is not watered with the blood of patriots. What’s happened is that there have never been — if you wanted or if you think you need to have weapons to take on the government, you need F-15s and maybe some nuclear weapons.”
If these words had been uttered by someone who knew what he were talking about, they’d be chilling to Americans… perhaps, upon reflection, they are. That bozo is President. But the concept of “militia” is not far-fetched. Certainly it is not a federal force, nor should it be funded federally. “Militias” should be local, and the more local the better. In the most Prudent view, those gun owners who choose to carry concealed could be part of an anonymous police-trained force that has been earlier referenced as “Guardians.” (See: http://www.prudenceleadbetter.com/2016/05/30/the-guardian-program/) These same would be the nucleus of local militias. Leadership of each jurisdiction’s militia would be chosen by election within the membership, and thereby granted officers’ titles.
The nature of “Militia,” Constitutionally, is inherently anti-federal. No wonder this aspect of the Second Amendment is never discussed. “Nuclear weapons,” indeed. At the time of its adoption, the concept of “Militia” was understood as the forerunners of the Continental Army ultimately led by George Washington, named a General by the Continental Congress. To make the revolution work required the establishment of a governing body separate from the King and his governors and troops. It was all extra-legal and deemed illegal by the Crown. Militias were already fighting the Redcoats by the time the Continental Congress got down to the business of revolutionary government.
Americans are so reliant upon a steady and dependable government in Washington, that we find it hard to conceive of an autonomous civilian militia, yet that is precisely what the framers were talking about. The colonies had just fought off a tyrant and the framers were determined that we be just as prepared to fight off another, should the tyranny arise. There existed very little affinity for a central government because of the tendency toward tyranny by virtually all such entities. The ability of citizens to check the power of government provided all the justification needed for a Second Amendment. Armed crime in the streets was practically non-existent in 1789, so that wasn’t the reason for it; hunting was so crucial to provisioning of food and even clothing, that no one had to “allow” for it in the Constitution. What was crucial was preventing another tyranny from replacing the British Crown. The twenty-seven words of the Second Amendment guaranteed the ability of citizens to replace a tyrannical central government, and Ratification was impossible without it.
Today, unfortunately, discussion of the true reason for the 2nd Amendment brings forth accusations of sedition and insurrection, “fringe” white-supremacist grouping, and religious fundamentalism. Yet, it is the Constitution we have and that forms us, even now.
To the “left,” constitutionalism is suspect in all iterations. It challenges and exposes the sanctity of the STATE for the hollow proto-tyranny towards which it constantly slithers. The “establishment,” nearly as tyrannical as it could be – economically, morally, politically – is directly threatened by the Constitution, as are all tyrants, everywhere. Our own proto-tyrants fight to make the U. S. as much like every other nation as they can, while patriots recognize and try to enhance the exceptional nature of our constitutional Republic. “America first” sends chills down the spines of the permanently re-elected swine that wallow for decades at a time in the halls of Congress.
Americans have unique responsibilities, including defense and preservation of the Constitution; it is not the task of elected people, specifically, but of THE PEOPLE. The Constitution came not from government, but from “We, the People…” WE ordained it, which is that we gave it life. WE ratified it, but only when the Bill of Rights was appended to it, which is that we entered into a covenant with all who forever after held office upon swearing to Preserve and Defend it – the Presidents merely a handful of those. The ultimate defense and execution of the Constitution is our business: the People’s. We are obligated to preserve it, defend it and live according to its rights and responsibilities on behalf of every American citizen, now and forever after, as well as on behalf of every nation and people, who depend upon the United States to stand firmly against globalism, socialism and communism… and dishonesty. Let’s get busy.