We have come to a point across this land where our challenge rests in a battle that is less between R's and D's and more a battle between those who reap benefits from their own malice and incompetence, screwing things up and perpetuating the ensuing chaos, and people who see that incompetence and mistakes and want to cut through the chaos to make their communities a good, safe places for their people to live, a place where they and their children can enjoy the benefits America still presents for all.
I am a conservative, not because I want to go back to some specific time in history where women are barefoot and pregnant or slavery exists in the way the left claims, I am conservative because I love the uniquely American culture of individual freedom and want to see that preserved for everyone.
I believe that while America has not always hewed true to the principles of our Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, that is a problem of application, not of principle. I believe history proves those principles are worth preserving and they are so fundamental and transcendent, they remain the hope for the people of America and the world.
If you try to bake a cake, but because you didn’t read, understand, or follow the instructions (or you just decided your way was better), and the cake turns out to be a smoking blob of miserable failure, it isn’t the fault of the instructions or the people who wrote them.
By the same token, if America has ever been “systemically” this thing or that thing, it wasn’t due to the recipe, it was due to the cooks. Before allowing people to rip up the recipe and institute another way to bake the cake, maybe we should try replacing the cooks and following the instructions we already have and know to produce a pretty damn good cake.
I happen to believe the words in our founding documents are so perfectly constructed and applied because they were inspired by God. These words are about as perfect as any ever put to paper:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
It is impossible to argue that treating all people as equals, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that government is established by the consent of the governed to preserve the freedom for them to pursue their skills and talents as they work to satisfy their needs, wants, and desires, and do so in a civil society are unreasonable or undesirable.
Problems ensue when government strays away from those basic principles and institute imperfect laws, laws that always can be misused and have unintended consequences - and then require even more laws to “patch” the mistakes. This cascade of errors method of governance is as close to a perpetual motion machine as man will ever come, it is the mythical self-licking ice cream cone.
In 69 A.D, the Roman general, historian, and philosopher Gaius Tacitus wrote: “Corruptissima republica plurimae leges” - or in plain English, the more numerous the laws, the more corrupt the state.
Words to live by.
I am a Republican, simply because the GOP is the only major political party that seems to still understand Tacitus’ admonition. I oppose Democrats in their contemporary progressive, socialist iteration simply because they do not. Codifying the entirety of life in some book of laws is not possible, nor is it even desirable. The Democrats are the heirs to the horrors of Kipling’s “Gods of the Copybook Headings”, and as always the “burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire”.
Politicians, as doctors are, should be required to take a version of the Hippocratic Oath, chiefly the vow to “First, do no harm.” I love my country and my community and the people in them, and I know they deserve better from the people they elect to represent them - or at least they deserve not to be harmed by the people they trust with governance.
It is far past the time for people who complain the loudest to consider maybe they are just doing freedom wrong.
To those who see nothing but evil in the goodness of America, I offer yet another admonition common to the medical field:
“Physician, heal thyself.”