Sayeth Eric Peters, and I could not possibly agree more.
Tomorrow is the 4th of July, the day Americans traditionally celebrate the independence of the American colonies that became states (plural) from Great Britain, which was not accomplished by asking for it.
The American colonists – some of them, a determined minority of them – took their independence.
And now the time has come to take it back.
Americans live in a consolidated state controlled by a central government so controlling it is challenging to come up with anything at all that it considers to be beyond its control. No one can be independent when subject to such control.
Americans are obliged to submit to such control at practically every turn. The only control they are permitted is to cast a single vote out of tens of millions for one of two controllers. We will not elect our way out of this. There is only one way out of this. It is the same way the American colonists got away from the control of king and parliament.
They got away from it.
Certainly, they had to fight for it. But what came before it came to fighting? The determination by a committed minority of Americans that they would no longer abide being controlled by king and parliament – and, implicitly, by anyone else. That was the spirit that animated the fighting, without which the fight would have been lost. The Americans who fought were out-manned and out-gunned in every battle that was fought, just about – especially the early ones. But it was what they were fighting for that made each man worth more than just a man (of which the British had plenty). Put another way, when a man fights for himself – and for his family and his friends – he has a lot more incentive to fight than a man who fights for a paycheck.
Give me liberty or give me death.
It is hard to fight men animated by such a sentiment. It is also hard to conquer them. John Adams, the second president of what became the United States (still plural when Adams was president) said that the fight for independence was won before the fight started when a minority of committed Americans decided the time had come to fight. Put another way, when those Americans came manfully face-to-face with the hard reality that independence would not be achieved by asking for it.
Perhaps a sufficient minority of committed Americans understands this now. Are you one of them?
Are you willing to take your independence back? For your own sake? For the sake of your children – and theirs, yet to be born?
That truly IS the burning question for all Real Americans at this point, isn’t it? Eric goes on to stipulate that it doesn’t necessarily have to come to actual, physical violence, although it very well might—and in my view almost certainly will, although I’d be nothing short of ecstatic to be proven wrong on that. Whichever way things go from here, this superb piece is inarguably one of the most stirring 4th of July paeans to American liberty I’ve ever read.
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A non-zero number of us are only waiting to fire until we can see the whites of their eyes.
After that, things sort of take care of themselves.