United we stand has long been part of the inner strength that enabled America to rise from thirteen disjointed colonies on the edge of lonely sea to the pinnacle of power.
Some people believe in the Six Degrees of Separation Theory: that everyone in the world are six or fewer steps away from each other and that a direct line such as “a friend of a friend” can be drawn to connect any two people in a maximum of six steps. Some people believe all of us are in this thing together, and that diversity is our strength and I am he as you are she as you are me and we are all together.
Even if we’re all connected in ways we cannot know I believe the world is filled with strangers. Take a ride and as you pass through country, town, and city you’re constantly presented with the faces of people you’ll never know, all of whom have lives and families that will never know you or your life or your family. Every day we see people we’ve never seen before and will never see again. They rise out of the mist beyond the pale of our personal knowledge and are immediately submerged again never to rise again. Our only and forever our only connection will be that one fleeting moment when we moved through a single frame of the separate sagas of our lives.
Unlike Cain I do believe we’re our brother’s keeper, and unlike Scrooge I believe we should help our brothers in need instead of seeing them boiled in their own pudding and buried with a stake of holly through their hearts. However, unlike the rhetoric of Marx, Lenin, and ex-President Obama I don’t believe that life should operate on the basis of from each according to their ability to each according to their need, or as we say in America today, spreading the wealth around.
In other words, I’m not a socialist. I believe in personal liberty, individual freedom, and economic opportunity. I found myself out of phase with the Progressive Clique which successfully maneuvered its way to power using the education system, the media, and until 2016 uninformed, uninvolved, and emotional voters.
Out of phase or not, I believe in the equality of opportunity which gives everyone a shot at success as opposed to the equality of outcome which the Progressives and their fellow travelers wish to foist upon us, which gives everyone the assurance of mediocrity. No matter the consequence, no matter the sacrifice we must stand up for what we believe or we’ll stand by while our nation is transformed into what we won’t be able to believe is still called the United States of America.
Day by day the bean counting pencil pushers, who make up the nameless faceless bureaucracy that is the Deep State, grind out rule after rule and regulation after regulation. President Obama’s signature piece of legislation, Obamacare churned out thousands upon thousands of pages of federal requirements all meant to fill in the blanks in a 2600 page bill that we had to pass to find out what was in it.
Hope and change became bait and switch. In 2012 Mr. Obama wasn’t even trying to win votes from those who disagreed with him. He wasn’t trying to change minds. He was trying to buy votes. He bet that generations of entitlements had finally birthed the lumpen proletariat that his theories of government proclaim must exist for History to reach its summit. He bet his second term on the belief that there were enough people dependent upon the government that they would vote for a handout instead of voting for a hand up. He bet that America had been dumbed down enough and bribed enough to trade our heritage of freedom for the yoke of a guaranteed something instead of the opportunity for everything.
Class warfare, penalizing success, dividing America into interest groups and voter blocks this was the strategy Mr. Obama thought would win as he worked to build a coalition of leftist intellectuals, government insider and those convinced they were disenfranchised. Looking at the polls it appeared he had the solid core of 40+% who will vote for a Democrat even if he is the devil himself. The question was would the unengaged and uninformed voters who could at least hope he would change combined with the illegals and the dead who at least get to vote in Chicago be enough for him to win?
Of course it didn’t hurt that the Republicans nominated a stiff who threw in the towel after winning the first debate.
Remember what a second Obama term looked like?
He won on the basis of a promise to double down on social democracy, a complete disregard for the checks and balances meant to maintain the balance of power between the branches of government, and a desire to totally transform America.
After the last four years of the Obamanation when he ruled by one unconstitutional decree after another and no one opposed anything he did what is left of the America we’ve known? How will we ever get back to where we came from? No entitlement once enacted has ever been repealed. The size of government never shrinks. The power it usurps from the people and the States is never surrendered.
What’s a constitutional libertarian independent to do?
A world filled with strangers keeps getting stranger all the time. No matter how many degrees of separation actually exist we should never be as divided as the Progressives and their identity politics try to portray us. We’re Americans. We can do better than this. Reject the siren song of free entitlements which are never free, and embrace the liberty our forefathers won for us. Let’s renew the great experiment in human freedom and strive to see our nation rise again as the last best hope of man that it was meant to be. The shining city on a hill that can light the way to a future worthy of free men and women held together by unity not disjointed in our separation.
Even if it takes more than six degrees of separation to connect to others what does it matter how connected we are to people around the world if we are in terminal disagreement with our fellow Americans? As a nation we’re divided between those who want to strive to achieve and those who thrive because they receive. The Progressives have bred generations of passive takers who believe they’re entitled to the fruit of others’ labor. They pay no taxes so they don’t care how high taxes go. They have no conception of paying for what they have, so they don’t care about the national debt. They see America as a vending machine, so they don’t believe in our unique place in History. They desire a shabby world of bread and circuses based on equality of outcome, so they don’t long to be all they can be.
Those of us who want America to be what America has been and what it should be, the home of the brave and the land of the free can’t let divisions divide us anymore! We must unite to save liberty or we will stand alone at the end of the day. We may be strangers to one another. We may not know each other but if we’re fellow believers in personal liberty, individual freedom, and economic opportunity we must unite over what connects us to save what has always made us E PLURIBUS UNUM.
A final thought: Just as we have prospered as no nation before through the application of “United we stand” so too will we reap the results of its mirror image: “Divided we fall.”
*** Dr. Robert Owens *** is a Life and Liberty News contributor, College Professor and the author of a widely published weekly opinion column, The History of the Future which can be viewed at www.drobertowens.com. He holds an Associate Degree in Biblical Studies, a Bachelor Degree in Religious Education, a Bachelor Degree in History, a Master’s Degree in Religious Education, a Master’s Degree in History, and a Ph. D. in Organizational Leadership. Dr. Owens teaches History, Political Science, Religion, and Leadership. His books include; The Constitution Failed, The Azusa Street Revival, America Won the Vietnam War, COGIC History, The More Things Change The More They Stay The Same, Then Came Trump, America’s Trojan War, and Constitutional Philosophy in Action. All these books are available from Amazon.com. Contact Dr. Owens drrobertowens@hotmail.com. Follow Dr. Robert Owens on Facebook or Twitter @ Drrobertowens.
