Don's Tuesday Column

THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson  Red Bluff Daily News   7/08/2014

Wisdom, lessons from the Declaration

The words of Calvin Coolidge, spoken on the sesquicentennial of the Declaration in 1926, recounted in “We Still Hold These Truths: Happy July 4” (Powerlineblog.com, Steven Hayward), began thus: “About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful.” He then wove an irrefutable narrative that pushed back against those who at that time held supposedly advanced political beliefs like progressivism, collectivism and socialism.

Coolidge pronounced that “new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day,” might induce Americans to “discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning cannot be applied to this great charter.

“If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people.

“Those who wish to proceed in that direction can not lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers.”

The July 4, 2013, posting of “The Eternal Meaning of Independence Day” (searchable by title at Powerlineblog.com), contained a major part of Abraham Lincoln’s speech of July 10, 1858, given in the midst of his campaign for Senator from Illinois against Stephen Douglas. The night before from the balcony of the Tremont Hotel in Chicago, Senator Douglas had taken issue with Lincoln’s famous pronouncement at the Illinois Republican Convention that the nation could not exist “half slave and half free.” There, Lincoln also condemned the Supreme Court’s ‘Dred Scott’ decision (which generally gave the Court’s approval to the institution of slavery, the denial of citizenship to former slaves and denied that new states could outlaw slavery).

Democrat Douglas contended that “this government of ours is founded on the white basis [made by, benefiting, and under administration of, white men], in such manner as they should determine.” To Douglas, Lincoln’s pronouncement belied the “diversity” in domestic institutions that was “the great safeguard of our liberties.” You see, “diversity” was “a shibboleth hiding an evil institution that could not be defended on its own terms” (S. Johnson). Currently, euphemisms like “diversity,” multiculturalism, and political correctness are designed to induce compliance, agreement and censorship in people who don’t even realize they are abandoning their own freedoms and our nation’s political, cultural and economic traditions.

All of Lincoln’s words in the Powerlineblog.com post deserve reading. He begins with “These 4^th of July gatherings I suppose have uses … I will state what I suppose to be some of them.” After noting America’s 30 or so million people who “own and inhabit about one-fiftieth part of the dry land of the whole earth,” he reminded those gathered of the inferior numbers and land held 82 years before.

He traced the “rise of prosperity” to the “iron men (who) fought for the principle that they were contending for … that by what they then did it has followed that the degree of prosperity has come to us … and we go from these meetings in better humor with ourselves. We feel more attached the one to the other, and more firmly bound to the country we inhabit. In every way we are better men in the age, and race, and country in which we live …”

He then honed in on the concept that, while about half of America’s people could count direct descent from those present at independence, the other half arrived after that point. Those newer arrivals could point to the words of the Declaration, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal” and claim it “as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that.

“Now I ask you if all these things (the inherent inequality of some group or race), if indulged in, if ratified, if confirmed and endorsed, if taught to our children, and repeated to them, do not tend to rub out the sentiment of liberty in the country, and to transform this government into a government of some other form … They are the arguments that kings have made (who) always bestrode the necks of the people … because the people were better off for being ridden. That is their argument … that says you work and I eat, you toil and I will enjoy the fruits of it.”

Readers may speculate as they wish, but I consider that when half of our citizens, even non-citizens, are induced and enticed into dependence on the money collected by government from the productive, responsible and self-sufficient other half—such collectivist redistribution is tantamount to enslavement of both those taxed and those being subsidized. It will “fundamentally transform” America into a country with hollow shells of freedom, liberty and abundance.

Next week I will give readers my take on Dinesh D’Souza’s “America: Imagine the World Without Her,” now showing in Anderson and Redding (americathemovie.com).