By Steve Paske | October 18, 2021
Last week’s newsletter closed with the following sentences: “Decisions carry positive or negative outcomes. Choose this day what kind of country you want to live in and pass on to future generations.” It is my sincere hope that you have taken some time over the past week to contemplate those words. Every undertaking, large or small, good or bad starts with a choice.
The Mayflower Compact of 1620 was the result of a choice that people made to flee oppression and persecution. Across millennia the hearts of men have either served to fuel conquest and oppression of people different from themselves, or to seek freedom and the protection of a just government from those that would.
When a government begins to use its power derived from the consent of the governed to oppress the governed and undercut the very freedom they were charged with protecting, then it is time for the People to rescind their consent. The United States has always been a nation of laws. Those laws are imbued with authority from our country’s founding document, the Constitution. Without law there is chaos and anarchy, with law there is order and prosperity. The 41 men that signed the Mayflower Compact understood that there were going to be individual differences, but that for the security and prosperity of their new community there had to be order that applied equally to all members of the society. Such is the purpose of law.
The beauty of America is the idea expressed on the Statue of Liberty by part of the poem by Emma Lazarus:
“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
We are not all alike, nor do we need to be. Diversity is strength, it is what tempers our nation. One nation united by the Constitution under one flag and one anthem that ensures we are free and strong enough to withstand fleeting attempts to divide us and fool us into thinking that anarchy is order and slavery is freedom.