America Needs A Statement Of Purpose Aligned With God's Will

Perhaps it was 10 years ago that I noted that a town next to ours at the time had an ordinance that said one must get a permit from the town in order to cut a tree on your property down.  This ordinance was supposedly necessary because trees reduced greenhouse gases and thereby kept the earth from burning up, or something.  I noted at the time that the town had effectively turned our trees into their trees.    Clearly the town was taking out one of the legs of the Declaration of Independence, the right to property.

But as William Sullivan notes at the American Thinker today, in the current COVID-19 situation, one has to ask oneself In What Sense Do You Think You Are Free?:

Here’s a sensible question. If the mayor of the most notable metropolis in the country can openly suggest that the government has the right to permanently shutter the doors of a church if it refuses to comply with “social distancing” guidelines, or any other edict the government finds necessary in a given moment, then what can’t the government do?

Just a few weeks ago, the threat of COVID-19 was considered by nearly everyone to be potentially far deadlier than it has yet proven to be. The fatality rates, hospitalization rates, and the predictions of American death tolls (once routinely touted as “over 2 million”) associated with infection were all much higher three weeks ago than they are today. And yet, as the dire projections about the impact of infection has become considerably smaller with new data and improved medical readiness, the social restrictions placed upon the populace have become progressively more obstructive and draconian.

...snip...

Examples abound of pastors of churches being threatened, fined, even jailed, for refusing to suspend religious worship during this period where “social distancing” is a matter of life and death.

This leads to myriad questions that deserve much attention and discussion, not least of which is how state governments have any authority to obstruct the First Amendment right “to peaceably assemble” or to prohibit “the free exercise of religion.” How all of this of this is consistent with any modern understanding of an incorporated Bill of Rights, as the United States Supreme Court currently holds as the jurisprudential standard, is anyone’s guess.

To answer Sullivan's question, we are demonstrably not free at all. Oh, we can have guns all right. But this begs a question asked 20 years ago by Jeffery R. Snyder in A Nation Of Cowards: Essays On The Ethics Of Gun Control, namely what good is the Second Amendment if we don't have free use of the other of our rights?  We have the right to freely assemble, to freely exercise our religion, to speak freely and and to petition the government for our grievances.  And of course there are other rights not enumerated.

Interestingly enough, the government does not have to exercise its police power, but then it shouldn't make laws that it can not, or will not enforce.  for that just garners a lack of respect for the law. In that regard, the fact that some governments are releasing convicted criminals into society does mean that the average citizen has even more reason to carry a gun for self defense.  But the fact that the governments who are releasing these criminals into the population suggests that they many not consider these people truly dangerous, and begs the question, why were these people sent to prison in the first place?

Sullivan, again:

It’s healthy for Americans to maintain skepticism about the motives and effectiveness of our government. Right now, there is a lot which calls the government’s motives and effectiveness into question. Like what I suspect is a growing number of Americans, I am completely unconvinced that the harsh measures being foisted upon the American people, as collective units amongst the states, are entirely necessary, and even more unconvinced that a similar outcome could not have been achieved with fewer rigid restrictions upon healthy and less at-risk individuals and American life, in general. And as days pass, I’m ever more convinced that the utter annihilation of the economy that we’ve seen, and the trillions in spending of taxpayer money that we absolutely, positively do not have, could have been significantly less damaging if we had demanded fewer government restrictions throughout this crisis, rather than more.

One may wonder how this has come about. One thing to note is that people have relatively short lives of perhaps 80 to 100 years. If the Left can slow down the rate of change, given people's general lack of knowledge about history, they can effect changes slowly over time. And so we see that this is exactly what has been happening in the United States. According to Scott S. Powell, also at the American Thinker:

What has been allowed to grow in the American cultural and political petri dish over the last two generations is a mixture whose contagious influence is as harmful as it is riddled with absurdities. A partial list would include: an unequal two-tiered justice system; open borders; preferential treatment of illegal aliens over American citizens; the dominance of political correctness and its de facto censorship of free expression; fake news; rewriting history; the 1619 project; renaming Columbus Day; the abolition of traditions of every size and shape; destruction of American historical monuments; trampling the American flag and other symbols of democracy; the eradication of family values while celebrating and elevating relationships counterproductive to procreation -- an imperative for any civilization that wants to survive; election fraud and dismantlement of the electoral process; an attempted coup that would have nullified the Constitution and the peoples’ sovereignty; a baseless and wasteful impeachment; the disgraceful character assassination of nominees to the Supreme Court; the pervasive infiltration of education with academics hostile to America; the adoption safe spaces and the prohibition of trigger words on college campuses; union control and influence on public school educational curricula whose net effect dumbs down students and often paints America as the great villain.

Any one of these is no little thing. But together, the collective influence of all these factors presents us with a reality that is disheartening and threatening. How did this happen and what are patriotic Americans to do?

We find ourselves in this perilous and incendiary state in large part because we were asleep or preoccupied, while internal enemies of America were gnawing away at our institutions and public civility over the last two generations -- following the playbook of Italian communist Antonio Gramsci, the father of the “long march through the institutions.” Gramsci called for a gradual radicalization of the knowledge industry and the cultural institutions -- “the superstructure of our society” -- so as to transform the values and morals of society. Gramsci believed that as society’s morals were softened and confused, greater division would ensue, leading to political and economic transformation. The changing orientation of the Democrat Party would seem to confirm the validity of Gramsci’s theories and suggests he was right.

Please go read the whole piece, but I will say that what Powell suggests is precisely what the country needs right now: a statement of purpose that aligns our actions with God's will. The Left's prescriptions are designed to place more power in the hands of an elite few, while God's will is that we are each free to do his will in our own lives. The truth is there are few once size fits all situations. We each need freedom to make the most of God's creation for all.