Left? Right? Is there a difference anymore?
On March 25th, Glenn Beck did a segment where he described why he thinks American’s are frustrated with government. I found his comments to be quite illuminating. Scroll to about 2:06 remaining in the clip:
I thought Glenn presented the concept very well. This whole notion of liberal and conservative, of left and right, they’re all so far away from what the founders of our country intended, it’s sometimes difficult to distinguish one from the other.
The gentlemen who wrote our constitution intended for there to be only enough central control as was needed to hold the union together. In the early days the federal government didn’t even have much of an army to speak of. You hear about groups of fighting men like the 20th Maine Regiment, which fought at Gettysburg during the Civil War. In those days, the states were responsible for providing the soldiers, and federal control was loose to say the least.
In the not so distant past, there was hardly any federal income tax, and the federal government was comparatively miniscule. States were responsible for the welfare of their citizens, and more than that, individuals were responsible for themselves. I’ll come back to this.
It’s only in the last few decades that government spending has really shot through the roof. At the same time, people have taken less and less responsibility for themselves. As people disclaim responsibility, they must shift that responsibility elsewhere. This elsewhere is the federal government. Parents no longer raise their kids, and expect public schools to do it for them. People have premarital sex, knowing the risks, then expect someone to come to their rescue when they get pregnant. People buy homes they can’t afford, then wait with their arm outstretched, waiting for someone to cover their losses.
People refuse to look after themselves. They have no sense of personal responsibility, and bit by bit they ask the government to take care of them, so they don’t have to take care of themselves. But every time we, as a nation, hand over our responsibilities to the government, we also hand over our rights. You see, according to our founding fathers, rights are things granted to us by our Creator (to use their term), and the government has no right to take those rights from us — we can only give them away.
We have these God-given rights, and those rights are inalienable, but that doesn’t mean they come without strings attached. We have the right to express ourselves freely, but with that right comes the responsibility to do so respectfully (for example, to refrain from shouting “fire!” in a crowded movie theater). We have the right to life, but with that comes the responsibility to protect the weak. We have the right to pursue our dreams, and with that comes the responsibility to do so fairly, and without depriving others of the right to pursue theirs.
Every time we claim to not have responsibilities, or that we shouldn’t be held accountable for our actions, we shed some of our rights like dead skin cells. The problem is that, unlike skin, our rights don’t magically regenerate themselves. One day we’ll turn into the frog sitting in a pot of water that has been slowly heated to a boil, pleasantly bathing in the warm bath of no responsibilities, unaware or uncaring that our complacency has cost us the very freedom we tried to exert when we claimed to have no responsibilities.
I don’t want to see that, and I don’t think most Americans do. What remains to be seen is how long it takes us as a nation to notice that the water’s heating up, and whether or not we notice in time to turn off the stove.
^Z
