declaration of independence

God Save These American States!

/ esteban

I am a sucker for any good book, movie, museum exhibit, national park, or monument whose subject matter is American history.  I’ve been this way from my youngest days when I would have my mom sew flags for me from scraps of cloth.  (I still have a Confederate flag that she made for me, before I knew better.)

Perhaps it’s telling, what with the national elections coming up six weeks from tomorrow, that I just finished watching the splendid, splendid, HBO series “John Adams.”

If you are at all a student of American history, or if you need something to cure the voter apathy that you may be feeling in the weeks leading up to November 6th, I highly encourage you to find this 7-part series and watch it.

Although I’m sure some liberties were taken with the minutiae of the historical details, I think it does give a good overview of the struggles of the Revolution and the way our country was knitted together when independence came.

We need to be reminded of how difficult it was for our nation to survive its early years and how personal honor and compromise were needed.  The relationship between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson is particularly interesting.

I’ve included a few links to Youtube videos that  will give you a taste of just how good this series is.  I hope you’ll find them as inspiring as I do.

 

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrvpZxMfKaU]

 

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A38mW2Il48k]

Fortnight for Freedom: Day 10 – “We didn’t pick the time, nor did we pick the fight”

/ esteban

I had the pleasure to meet Archbishop Joseph Naumann briefly during the 2011 Catholic New Media Conference in Kansas City, KS.

This interview with him, published in the Catholic World Report, has some very interesting comments about the fight for religious liberty, social justice, the principle of subsidiarity and personal virtue.

Social justice doesn’t mean the state taking care of everybody, but empowering people so they can take care of themselves and their families. That’s the real dignity we want to help people achieve.

 

I so agree with this.  We have so many problems to address in our society, but in my belief, very very few of them must be solved by the government, the least effective means of solving any problem.

Does the state have some role to play with the poor? Absolutely, I think, in terms of a safety net. But that doesn’t mean that we keep increasing the number of people who are dependent on the state in some way. That, to me, is the direction we’ve been going for the last 50 years.

When the government purposely strives to have the majority of its people dependent on it for food, health care, etc., it is subverting the true meaning of that wonderful phrase from the Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.