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The Americans who did not need wake-up calls
One of leading motifs of our time is the ever-renewed “wake-up” call that never wakes us up. With each new shocking event or violation—a terrorist attack, an ethnic riot, an outrageous Supreme Court decision completely outside the Constitution, a White House celebration of pro-terrorist enemies, and on and on and on—we tell ourselves that this will wake people up, and that this will wake people up, and that this will wake people up—but they never wake up. How different were our predecessors of the Revolutionary generation. James Madison wrote:
The people of the U.S. owe their independence & their liberty, to the wisdom of descrying in the minute tax of 3 pence on tea, the magnitude of the evil comprised in the precedent.The moment Great Britain laid an admittedly tiny tax on the colonists for imported goods, which it had never done before, they understood the principle being advanced, that the colonies, without any representation in the British parliament, could now come under its complete power. They saw the true tendency of what was happening, and they fought it. This is what we modern Americans have utterly failed to do, on one issue after another, across the entire front of the culture wars and the undoing of our civilization.
As I’ve said before, true conservatives (or, in this context, true devotees of liberty) are those who recognize a threat to their society (or their liberty) the instant it appears, and are roused to action. Email entry |