INDEPENDENCE DAY

The word independence simply means a state or quality of being independent; freedom from control by others or self-government.

Come July 4, 2009 I am hopeful that the head of the millions upon millions of families celebrating Independence Day take the time to pray a prayer by Billy Graham as follows:

'Heavenly Father, we come before you today to ask your forgiveness and to seek your direction and guidance. We know Your Word says, 'Woe to those who call evil good,' but that is exactly what we have done. We have lost our spiritual equilibrium and reversed our values. We have exploited the poor and called it the lottery. We have rewarded laziness and called it welfare. We have killed our unborn and called it choice. We have shot abortionists and called it justifiable. We have neglected to discipline our children and called it building self esteem. We have abused power and called it politics. We have coveted our neighbor's possessions and called it ambition. We have polluted the air with profanity and pornography and called it freedom of expression.. We have ridiculed the time-honored values of our forefathers and called it enlightenment. Search us, Oh God, and know our hearts today; cleanse us from every sin and set us free. Amen!'

I am told that Commentator Paul Harvey aired this prayer on his radio program, 'The Rest of the Story,' and received a larger response to this program than any other he has ever aired. With the Lord's help, may this prayer sweep over our nation and wholeheartedly become our desire so that we again can be called 'One nation under God.'

I am a World War II veteran and now some eighty odd, years later as I prepare to celebrate Independence Day once again, I have this God awful fear of uncertainty for our nation.

Within my lifetime, I have seen The New Deal, The Fair Deal, The Great Society and now The Sleazy Deal. All of these have been foisted upon the citizenry of this nation by liberally dominated administrations seeking power and control for the federal arm of our government. They, the liberal politicians and their followers, have an intrinsic desire to micro-manage the lives of all the people of this nation. They want the people, especially minorities, to be dependent upon them. They actually believe that they know best and they have some warped inner need or desire that some fellow citizens should be inferior to them and dependent upon them. They are elitists!

Some two hundred odd years ago, our forefathers suffered untold hardships, fought wars and died to forge a new nation under God. This new nation was designed and established as a republic under a written constitution that was, in my opinion, divinely inspired. This new republic, the United States of America was intended to be governed by responsible citizens. A citizen had to prove to his peers and provide proof of responsibility before he could cast a vote. That made sense then and it makes sense now!

It was intended that we, the citizens, take care of our families, our community, our county, our state, our nation and in that order. That is how it should be and how it was until the New Deal began to reverse this order. During the depression, the elitists, taking advantage of a dire situation, began to take control of the citizenry by enactment of federal laws that over rode the rights of individual states. As the federal government, guided by the liberal elite, we the average citizen, began to loose our freedoms and responsibilities by dribs and drabs. We were seduced by the false promise of security from the cradle to the grave. Now, as a nation, we are standing on the rim of ruin simply because, we the people, succumbed to the secular tenets of false beliefs, decadence and immorality!

Many of the decisions that once rightly belonged to the local citizenry, are now made by the federal government. We no longer have a voice in the education of our children. The powers of the local school boards once ruled supreme. Now the federal bureaucrats tell us how to run our schools. Our courts and justice system were once run by honorable gentlemen seeking justice. It is now in shambles, a dishonorable system, a separate entity unto itself, perpetuating its own image, under the secular guidelines of federally mandated regulations.

Think about this! Under federal law anyone can simply drive up to a window and register to vote. There is no requirement for any sort of identification whatsoever. An open invitation to voter fraud and another step toward irresponsibility!

What have these liberals wrought? All over this nation, jury panels are selected from the list of registered voters. Is it any wonder that our justice system is in shambles? We see and hear, throughout the whole country, where irresponsible jurists have disregarded the law and set rapists and murderers free! Swift and just punishment for crimes in our society is a thing of the past.

It cost the taxpayers millions of dollars to carry out the death penalty in this country. We used to do it for the cost of a good hemp rope!

When any society looses the guts to protect itself and it’s citizenry it is doomed. Walk the streets of any city in this country, especially after the sun goes down, and then tell me you feel safe, sane and secure. I remember when I could set foot on any square foot of ground in these United States and feel perfectly safe!

We have allowed the liberal agenda to reverse and rearrange our priorities and our responsibilities as citizens so that we now pay our allegiance to the federal government first and foremost. Lets face it, we are no longer a nation under God! We are no longer bound by the Judeo-Christian ethics and principles upon which this nation was founded. Our government is secular in nature and the nine senile senior citizens sitting on the Supreme Court are hell bent to keep it that way. This secular government is underway, right now, to rip the Ten Commandments, the basic rules of any civilized society, from the walls of a judge in my neighboring state of Alabama! I am not a historian, not by any means, but I do think that a nation forged in the minds of wise men began to change and these changes have came about within in my lifetime.

It started in the early 1930’s. The liberal and the left wing philosophy of the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration brought with it a national mentality of standardization.

Individual liberties and freedom be damned! We must conform to a national standard of conduct. We know what is best for you! Since that time, we the American people have been urged by law, or by hook or crook, to strive for a sameness. We became a nation of apers – monkey see monkey do.

The liberal mentality of an entire nation since that era has followed the dictate of a system that has lead us now to the brink of disaster! I personally think that this desire for sameness is a misinterpretation of the word love! True love is tough love! It is not making less fortunate people into your image or dependent upon you! It is teaching them, imparting the knowledge, the skills and the tools to help them help themselves!

Somewhere along the way, we the people of this nation, accepted this mentality to the point that we are expecting everyone to accept a collective thought process commonly know as political correctness! History has never been recorded correctly, but with this sameness thing we are grossly attempting to grasp for a false heritage. We do this by purging words, symbols, events, and also our compassion and memory for things we hold so very dear. We fling them into a consuming fire like a misguided book burning!

This sameness, this clone like madness permeates our education system from top to bottom. Each student is as different as day and night. The uniqueness of each individual person should be exemplified and respected. Our teachers should be afforded the opportunity to do just that! What is the wisdom in scaring the hell out of our children while they are still in high school with a national standard ACT/SAT test? These tests are putting untold pressures, stress and worry upon our children needlessly. Our children really believe that their futures are at stake. Are we nuts? High schools should be able to reflect each student’s ability to learn with a report card. Higher education facilities should be able to discern each applicant’s qualifications themselves. This is another hazard of following a hog into the ditch!

Our misguided intentions have carried over into the courts of our country. The greatest miscarriage of justice started when the justices of The Supreme Court of the United States took it upon themselves to make and enact laws rather than interpret those that already existed!

These misguided decisions of a broken justice system permeated into every public government office throughout our land with the mistaken theory that most of us are now a nation of haters. We actually think that we need hate crimes to protect ourselves! We think that violence will disappear if we got rid of our guns! We fail to teach our children the difference between right and wrong, then wring our hands and ask why, when they kill each other at the drop of a hat.

Freedom, human rights and truth are synonymous. That is the absolute truth; and as responsible citizens we must constantly ask ourselves the question: “what is the price of freedom?”

And yes, I am fearful of the leaders of this nation as never before.

Is The Human Rights Era Ending? A question posed, apparently to the student body, by Michael Ignatieff, professor of human rights policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. A mundane speculation of the current “spin” of pacifists following the terrorists’ attack of 9/11 that somehow made The New York Times of February 5, 2002. A typical distortion of information slanted to their particular agenda.

The question is indicative of the many various and sundry religious sects, TV news media, newspapers, educators and the liberal elements of our society that are joined into a loosely knit conspiracy of political correctness, second-guessing President Bush as our Commander in Chief in the war on terrorism.

The premise, theory or presumption upon which these type questions are asked and answered, are extremely limited and within the context of time they are seriously flawed.

In seeking truth we sometimes fail to take into consideration the accumulated knowledge of thousands of years of experience. Students are encouraged to look and find within themselves their own truth about the world around them. The collected wisdom of the ages seems to have been overlooked by the professor.

God created man in His own image and with a will of his own. That is a fact. Human rights and freedom are a progression of truth within the reconciliation of man with his God. It is that simple! We learn this individually and then we must practice it collectively. (Political science could possibly help us when we are mature enough to understand what Job did, that God has the answers, not man.)

Educators, professors and philosophers seem to treat and characterize the philosophy that all truth is therefore relative; that whatever is true to you may not be true to me. Thus, the modern day thinking is that personal opinions and prerogatives are given equal standing with time tested wisdom of the ages and the sages throughout the history of mankind. The tenured professors of America’s higher education, colleges and universities are usually the writers of the modern textbook and they generally overlook and/or distort the truth of facts, experiences and accumulated knowledge. The student is left holding the bag without proof that the newly implanted ideas are indeed factual.

Many people will argue with you that there is no such thing as absolute truth. They say that each of us necessarily formulate our own personal truth. Without a shadow of a doubt, many matters cannot be answered with absolute certainty. Which girl is the prettiest; who is the best singer or who is the greatest President of the United States? Clearly, there is no absolute true answer.

We must admit however, that other questions do provide clear and absolute truthful answers. If I have three eggs in one hand and two eggs in the other hand and put the eggs in one empty bag, the bag will then contain five eggs.

I seriously doubt that any of the modern day professors, philosophers and educators have ever had a genuine original thought! Most of the, so called, new ideas are merely a rehash of accumulated knowledge of seers and prophets of old. Most of these re-discovered ideas need time and examination of a host of critics to see if they are actually true. In their pursuit of knowledge these professors end up making fools of them selves!

A lot of people do not want to obey God. Many humans, being created in His image, want to be god! People like this, somehow or other, prefer that they, themselves, must make the ultimate and final determination of truth. As a human being do you really want to take this responsibility?

We must as human beings, each and every on of us, consider something as a basis for whatever we believe to be true. Some people believe that a simple majority of any given society determines what is right and what is wrong – the truth and error of all things. Slavery was once acceptable in this country. Today, apparently the majority believes that by killing unborn children is acceptable behavior.

Morality should not change with the whims of a social majority. If that be the case, ultimately no one can consider them selves safe. Responsible people know that the real truth should not and does not change. Whatever is true today will be true in the future. The denial by the majority in any society cannot change this fact.

This still leaves us with the question; what is truth?

Considering a lifetime of studying history, philosophy, the Scriptures and most of the mainline religions of the world I have come to the conclusion that my quest for truth rests solely with the Christian faith; a faith that we should love our God with all our heart, our soul and our mind and to love our neighbor as our selves; a triune God consisting of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit - - - the past, the present and the future.

Christians are on a need to know basis and The Holy Spirit is readily available at a moments notice; just ask as a Christian, and if you need to know, the truth will be revealed.

Our President, our Vice President, the Speaker of The House ad the Majority Leader of the Senate are all products of a liberal and seriously flawed educational system.

They simply cannot understand that we are at war and survival is the number one right, without which all other rights are meaningless.