| America is the summation of the political choices we make just as individually we are the sum of all our individual life choices. |
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We are the Choices We Make
By: George Noga – October 30, 2016
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Alexander Hamilton pondered: “Whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend on accident and force.” James Madison added: “What is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature.” During the first 175 years of our beloved republic, Madison and Hamilton would have rested easy. We made good public choices; we saw to it that whoever was elected president or to Congress, and those they appointed and confirmed to the judiciary, had little power over our lives. Government had few, limited and enumerated powers and there were abundant checks and balances against the concentration and abuse of power. All branches of government stayed inside the constitutional box; states zealously guarded their federalist prerogatives; and the media were effective watchdogs. No longer! We are answering Hamilton’s question in the negative and to Madison’s dismay, the worse angels of our nature are dominating the better angels. If any society of men fails to get government right, it affects every aspect of our lives and life itself. If we get government right, we live our lives in freedom and prosperity; if we fail, happiness, liberty and property are forfeit and life becomes nasty, brutish and brief. If we don’t get government right, our children and our children’s children will survive in an Orwellian torpor with their lives and liberty constantly at risk because of obeisance to failed ideologies, fantasies, political correctness and the perpetual and futile search for utopias. They will pay dearly for our debt binge and intergenerational theft. They will people a dysfunctional world where nuclear arms proliferate in places committed to our destruction. They will be a lost generation in every sense. If we fail to answer Hamilton’s question in the affirmative, we will inhabit a Clockwork Orange world with our lives vastly diminished and trivialized in countless and unspeakable ways. We will live lives of quiet desperation. We will fulfill Kipling’s prophesy in the Gods of the Copybook Headings – the final verse of which follows. Note: By the term “Gods of the Copybook Headings” Kipling means the experience and wisdom of mankind through the ages.
Our lives individually and as a nation are nothing more than the summation of all the choices we make. If we make good choices in our individual lives, it will come to naught if the choices we make in our public lives are bad ones. Of the 110 billion humans who have trod this earth, fewer than 1% have lived their lives in liberty. We must make wise public choices or just as surely as water wets us and fire burns, terror and slaughter will return. And don’t think for a moment that it can’t happen here! The next post November 6th contains some final thoughts about the election.
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