If so then your story has the opportunity to possibly be included in my upcoming new book on the lives and stories of ten people who are shining examples for the rest of us of American exceptionalism. Those chosen will also be offered to appear as guests on my radio show.

To submit your story for consideration simply email me your name, contact information and a brief (less than 3-4 paragraphs) description of  your story of American exceptionalism.

In his farewell speech President Reagan urged us not to allow our values to slip away and to once again make them a part of our pop culture.

So whether you were born elsewhere and immigrated to America or if your family’s roots date back to the Mayflower landing I want to hear your stories of American exceptionalism!

The first known person to write about the United States as being exceptional was a Frenchman named Alexis de Tocqueville around 1831. Tocqueville believed America’s exceptionalism was a result of the American Revolution and a uniquely American ideology based on liberty, self reliance, the common person free from a ruling class and private business free from over-regulation.  He marveled at how our democracy infused into every nature of our society and culture at a time when it was not popular elsewhere in the world.

Ironically it was Soviet leader Joseph Stalin who first coined the phrase ‘American Exceptionalism’ chastising members of the American Communist Party for believing that America was independent of the Marxist laws of history “thanks to its natural resources, industrial capacity, and absence of rigid class distinctions.”

Which brings me back to President Barack Obama.  Obama is an example of American exceptionalism sadly though he just doesn’t realize it.  Where else other than America could a person of his background have risen to the highest office in the land? As many of you are probably aware Obama gave a remarkably unexceptional answer when asked by a reporter with London’s Financial Times if he believed in American exceptionalism:

“I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.”

How’s that for patriotism, principles and passion?

In his farewell speech Ronald Reagan both captured the spirit of American exceptionalism and warned of how easily it could slip away when he said,

“Finally, there is a great tradition of warnings in presidential farewells, and I’ve got one that’s been on my mind for some time…The national feeling is good, but it won’t count for much, and it won’t last unless it’s grounded in thoughtfulness and knowledge.

…Are we doing a good enough job teaching our children what America is and what she represents in the long history of the world?  Those of us who are over 35 [in 1989] or so years of age grew up in a different America. We were taught, very directly, what it means to be an American. And we absorbed, almost in the air, a love of country and an appreciation of its institutions. If you didn’t get these things from your family, you got them from the neighborhood… Or you could get a sense of patriotism from school. And if all else failed, you could get a sense of patriotism from popular culture. The movies celebrated democratic values and implicitly reinforced the idea that America was special. TV was like that, too, through the mid-’60s.

Our spirit is back, but we haven’t re-institutionalized it. We’ve got to do a better job of getting across that America is freedom–freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of enterprise. And freedom is special and rare. It’s fragile; it needs protected.”

President Reagan urged us not to allow our values to slip away and to once again make them a part of our pop culture.  Send me your stories of American exceptionalism.

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These are terrible ingredients — a volatile mixture sitting dangerously close to open flames. There are those who wish to do nothing more than to fan these flames. “Destroying America will be the culmination of my life’s work.”~ George Soros. In their twisted view, in order to create a New America, the old one must be destroyed and erased. These are the veterans and decedents of the Radial Left from the 1960’s. Others are merely useful idiots in this plot who have fallen victim to the visions of utopia of a completed society of equals in every way imaginable: equal in squalor; equal in misery.

Defense cuts would allow the United States to tend to a few other priorities, which just might take Americans’ minds off the fact that their country is no longer No. 1. Perhaps the United States could focus on constructing a high-speed rail line or two, or maybe even finish the job on extending health care. After all, of the large economies that enjoyed a AAA rating from Standard & Poor’s last week, the United States ranked at the bottom of the list in terms of life expectancy, and it was the only country without universal health care. Perhaps America could also spend a little more on basic education; the United States was at the tail end of the AAA club when it came to believing basic scientific truths like evolution, and it scored lowest out of all those countries on international tests of students’ math skills. Charles Kenny, Foreign Policy Magazine

The rest are incompetent boobs with no direction, no solutions, and no sense of soul. They are equally dangerous. In over their heads nincompoops who think by defending the very programs and policies that promise to destroy our nation, they are being good stewards of government. That is to say nothing of the run-of-the-mill thieves and prostitutes who plunder our treasury for votes and comfortable seats in power.

There is an alternative to this, though.

We do have elections coming up. Elections are the only legitimate and lawful actions that can be taken by which to change the direction of government.  But unless there is a wholesale change in the way our government performs, a chance to see a reversal is unlikely. Elections should be, as they were always intended to be, the solidification of the will of the people; the final seal of approval from a fully engaged public. As I stated in the original post, we are the gatekeepers.

Gatekeepers are not passive. They do not man turnstiles and collect tickets. They control access and grant entrance into a sacred hall. It is a rigid system based on predefined conditions, but it is a fair system. For far too long, the gates have gone unmanned. As a result, our society has been infiltrated and is being destroyed from the top down, inside out. It’s time to man the gates again. Tell the Silent Majority they have been replaced by the Majority.

Come to Washington DC as I said. Bring a couple million with you. Email the strong and influential personalities and Tea Party groups that share your concern and have the ability to help. Let’s meet up in the National Mall and then take a stroll down Pennsylvania Avenue lock stepped together. As I also stated, no crying is allowed. Pick up after yourselves and tip generously. While there, we’ll give them our list of demands. We’ll direct them to our website. They can read about our positions. Learn about who we are. We’ll bring the next election to proper focus. We won’t rally to them. They must rally to us.

Afterwards, we’ll gladly go back to our homes and to our jobs until we are needed again. If the Majority remains silent, America will pass with barely a whimper. (If you don’t mind the sounds of rioting, that is). The radical few and incompetents must be stopped.

Find comfort in the fact you will not be alone and we are not starting from scratch. We’ll even have entertainment from talented Patriots. Go and check out James Kole.

Just as the anti-war artists of the 60’s expressed their political views through music, so too are an increasing number of artists of the TEA Party movement who refuse to keep silent about the destruction of this great nation by many who ironically subscribed to those radical, anti-government views of the 60’s counterculture movement.

He has a genre all to his own. YouTube James Kole – “Don’t Tread On Me”

From the comments pulled from the original post:

RickOden “It has no choice, it IS an American Revolution.”

FinbarOS “A pre-revolutionary moment, but with modern means and strategies.”

pilgrim_shadow “We DO want to take our country back. Meanwhile, our politicians are more than happy to sell us problems disguised as solutions.”

chopper “Yes…………………no crying allowed. This will not be a teary American Revolution! Winners and Patriots to the front.”

adamkon1104 “Darn right its a revolution.”

fishloreOne “I’m not fatalistic, I’m not scared, I’m not worried about the future. I’m excited. I mad as hell, but I know I’m on the right side of history so there is nothing to fear.”

Flig Narson “A 10-Million Man — and Woman — March on Washington is overdue. No well-behaved crowds listening to inspirational speeches, but rather a march directly on the Capitol of the United States demanding the immediate recall of every elected official. It is time to bring Washington to its knees… peacefully, but in massive numbers… and remind those there that they govern with our consent.
Can the momentum for such an action begin here?”

Allow me to explain, but first  please understand that for the purpose of this discussion I will be speaking in absolutes. It simply makes it easier to argue. We should all understand  that in-between the polar opposites of of which are discussed are thousands of gradients of gray. The two polar opposites of which I speak are of course Liberalism and Conservatism.

The Conservative philosophy is based on a belief in the ultimate goodness of man. That is given the choice between doing “good” and doing “bad.” Conservatives believe that when free enough to make the decision, man will do the right thing. After all man, as the bible says, was created in God’s image. Like God, man will strive to do good, either for the benefit of himself and family and/or for the benefit of the nation itself. Therefore as your beliefs move closer to conservatism along the political spectrum those beliefs will include that lesser government is needed because man can govern himself.

Conservatives focus on the individual and because that individual is born with the inclination to do well, any rights that come with that inherent goodness, come from God who also gave man that inherent goodness. Hence the belief expressed in 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 unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

In Conservative thought, government’s primary role is to protect those unalienable rights.

Thus when you understand the Declaration of Independence you also understand that the American Revolution was based on conservative principles.

The first government developed after independence, the Articles of Confederation met the objective of limiting the size of the central authority, but the resulting government was so weak that it could not protect those God-given rights, the country was slipping into the tyranny of anarchy. Anarchy is as bad as too much government because there is no way to protect people’s rights, especially the right to own and grow one’s property through commerce, as every state had their own regulations and taxation standards inhibiting interstate business and the central government had no taxation powers to allow it to establish institutions to protect that right to property (like an Army).

Philosopher John Locke felt property was the most important of the natural rights.

Locke established that private property is absolutely essential for liberty: “every Man has a Property in his own Person. This no Body has any Right to but himself. The Labour of his Body, and the Work of his Hands, we may say, are properly his.” He continues: “The great and chief end therefore, of Mens uniting into Commonwealths, and putting themselves under Government, is the Preservation of their Property.”

While Jefferson, in writing the US Declaration of Independence changed the word property to “pursuit of happiness.” In the future President’s mind,”pursuit of happiness” did not mean cruising down the pacific highway in a Mustang Convertible with a Playboy Model in the front seat and Creedence Clearwater blaring from the car stereo.  Pursuit of Happiness to Jefferson meant pursuing your potential in life, done through commerce and hard work.

The Republic formed via the Constitution was developed as to be strong enough to protect the individual power of each citizen, while including check and balance  to ensure that the new government would not be able to trounce on the individualism established in the nascent American culture. Because they believed in the ultimate goodness of man the founders wanted to ensure that each American was free to “be all that they could be,” but each in their own individual manner guaranteeing the diversity of ideas that would one day make American the economic leader of the world.

Liberal thought, on the other hand believes that man cannot sort things out by himself.  It has within it a deep mistrust of human nature.  Because man is ultimately a narcissistic being,  government is needed to protect one person from the other, so nobody’s right will be trampled on.  Inherently small government becomes big government additional tasks must be completed and that diversity of ideas must by nature become more of a collectivist group think, or as Spock’s dying words in Star Trek II indicate The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one.

Unlike its American counterpoint,  the French Revolution was a liberal one. While the American one guaranteed Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness, the French Revolution was for Liberté, égalité, fraternité (liberty, equality and fraternity). The difference is subtle but important as it could also explain some of the differences between conservatives and Liberal/Progressives in today’s US.  America’s founders and today’s Conservatives promise that people would have an equal right  to pursue and grow their  “property” the best way they knew how using their own methods and individual strategy.  The French Revolutionists and today’s Liberal/Progressives believe that everyone is guaranteed an equal result to their pursuits as long as it is done in a way that is consistent with the beliefs of the the collective fraternity (brotherhood). Hence in the French Revolution when people had their own individual beliefs, they became suspect and even worse became headless.

Because of the basic mistrust of mankind in the Liberal/Progressive philosophy, they believe that the collective government must step in and guarantee the “equality.” Since any reward stemming from one’s stem f a government-run strategy or collective thought when Liberal/Progressive’s talk equality they point to end result after all the idea is shared so any difference in compensation is gained through an accident of execution. Conservatives, on the other hand have a belief in individualism so they point to an equality of opportunity, therefore it is a person’s individually-owned ideas creating  the compensation.

The Liberal/Progressive government must take a collectivist stance. Only the government can  fulfill this responsibility because only the government can have see the “big picture,” and understand the needs of the entire population. Thus we had Nancy Pelosi’s statement that only after the health care bill is passed will we able to understand what is in it. She actually saying that until the bill was implemented, the common man cannot understand how the bill addresses the collective good.  That general “voter be dammed” attitude of the Progressives in Congress can also be tied to that collectivist stance.

What the collectivist attitude ignores is how individualism and diversity of ideas built this country, and how their disappearance will destroy it.

One of those “articles” discussing this issue I read yesterday was an amazing piece by Mark Steyn called Dependence Day. I have always been a fan of Steyn but this may possibly be his best. In the piece, Steyn relates what he considers Friedrich von Hayek’s greatest insight in The Road to Serfdom which should serve as a warning:

There is one aspect of the change in moral values brought about by the advance of collectivism which at the present time provides special food for thought. It is that the virtues which are held less and less in esteem and which consequently become rarer are precisely those on which the British people justly prided themselves and in which they were generally agreed to excel.

The virtues possessed by Anglo-Saxons in a higher degree than most other people, excepting only a few of the smaller nations, like the Swiss and the Dutch, were independence and self-reliance, individual initiative and local responsibility, the successful reliance on voluntary activity, noninterference with one’s neighbor and tolerance of the different and queer, respect for custom and tradition, and a healthy suspicion of power and authority.

Steyn continues by postulating what it means for the United States

Within little more than half a century, almost every item on the list had been abandoned, from “independence and self-reliance” (some 40 percent of Britons receive state handouts) to “a healthy suspicion of power and authority” —the reflex response now to almost any passing inconvenience is to demand the government “do something.” American exceptionalism would have to be awfully exceptional to suffer a similar expansion of government without a similar descent, in enough of the citizenry, into chronic dependency.

The American “experiment” was and is a unique one. For the first time in the history of man, a government was established not to create and accumulate power for a central authority, but to guarantee that power will  be perpetually held by each and every citizen. It is precisely these individual sparks of power that built the swaggering, “I can do anything” mindset that is part of the American dream.

Because we formed a government based on the power of the individual, each and every one of us believe that we as Americans have the power to change the world. That’s what the American dream,exceptionalism and inventiveness comes from. It is not that we are nation populated with people who were born better than everyone else, American exceptionalism is based on the belief that our country is populated with people who had the individual power to strive to be better than everyone else.

Mark Steyn argues as Great Britain increased the size of its government after WWII the once proud Anglo nation declined. He continues by saying that’s exactly what is happening to the United States. As the size and power of government grows, it needs to take the power from the individuals who held it. With the transfer of power comes a change in responsibility. No longer is the government dependent on the people, but he people become dependent on the government. As the “collective” replaces the individual,  it will extinguish the individualism that built the American dream created the mind-set that each and every one of our citizens has the power within us to change the world:

Does the fate of the other senior Anglophone power hold broader lessons for the United States? It’s not so hard to picture a paternalist technocrat of the Michael Bloomberg school covering New York in cctv ostensibly for terrorism but also to monitor your transfats. Permanence is the illusion of every age. But you cannot wage a sustained ideological assault on your own civilization without profound consequence. Without serious course correction, we will see the end of the Anglo-American era, and the eclipse of the powers that built the modern world. Even as America’s spendaholic government outspends not only America’s ability to pay for itself but, by some measures, the world’s; even as it follows Britain into the dank pit of transgenerational dependency, a failed education system, and unsustainable entitlements; even as it makes less and less and mortgages its future to its rivals for cheap Chinese trinkets, most Americans assume that simply because they’re American they will be insulated from the consequences. There, too, are lessons from the old country. Cecil Rhodes distilled the assumptions of generations when he said that to be born a British subject was to win first prize in the lottery of life. On the eve of the Great War, in his play Heartbreak House, Bernard Shaw turned the thought around to taunt a British ruling class too smug and self-absorbed to see what was coming. “Do you think,” he wrote, “the laws of God will be suspended in favor of England because you were born in it?”

In our time, to be born a citizen of the United States is to win first prize in the lottery of life, and, as Britons did, too many Americans assume it will always be so. Do you think the laws of God will be suspended in favor of America because you were born in it? Great convulsions lie ahead, and at the end of it we may be in a post-Anglosphere world.

The media have made much ado about the political Tea parties, started in 2009, that have had some level of success in protesting the government expansions under the Obama administration. Unfortunately, that movement – for all its many good points and despite the clarity of its Taxed Enough Already moniker – represents a mish-mash of ideas and has been plagued by factional disputes. The most successful mini-revolutions take place when the People are unified around a simple and clearly understood theme.

One of the best recent representations of that old defiant spirit can be found in the past couple of weeks in the Los Angeles suburb of Bell, a poor mostly Latino city of about 37,000, where about 2,000 city residents showed up and forced the resignation of worthless city officials after they learned about the way they had enriched themselves at the expense of city taxpayers. As one Bell resident said after a council member gave a self-serving justification of her $100,000 part-time salary (council members typically earn about $8,000 a year): “You were a crook yesterday, you’re a crook today, and you’ll be a crook tomorrow.”

That’s a simple idea most of us can rally around! The crooks are ripping us off.

The Bell situation garnered national attention because of the level of plundering. A city manager, Robert Rizzo, earned $787,000 a year from the impoverished burb – a place that has been cutting services and where 10 percent of the budget went to Rizzo, Police Chief Randy Adams ($457,000) and Assistant City Manager Angela Spaccia ($357,000).

Rizzo – who lives in fancy digs in Huntington Beach and has a horse farm in Washington state – boasted that he could have easily earned as much in the private sector, which is a load of nonsense and something that all city managers claim. Yet these managers, who typically make nearly $300,000 a year in California, manage basic city tasks in a bureaucratic monopoly environment. They do not run the equivalent of private, competitive firms.

Because of the bad publicity, California officials rushed in to make declarations about the awfulness of the Bell situation. Attorney General Jerry Brown, who is almost wholly dependent on the public sector unions for his gubernatorial campaign against former eBay CEO Meg Whitman, decried the salaries and launched investigations in city contracts. Steve Cooley, the Los Angeles County district attorney and GOP attorney general candidate, vowed to look into various fraud allegations surrounding the corrupt little Bell fiefdom. But Cooley himself is a testament to the pension problem, given his expected $275,000-plus cost-of-living-adjusted pension from Los Angeles County taxpayers. And where were they before this? Where are they on the many other little fiefdoms that are ripping off the populace?

Reports suggest that Rizzo and his cohorts manipulated a bureaucratic system that they understood (and the city residents didn’t) to enrich themselves. Pending anything that the AG and DA can prove, this appears to have been legal. The problem in Bell is that the greedbags got too greedy. How can anyone justify a pension for Rizzo that is worth somewhere around $30 million and whose costs will be spread out among 140 cities that are pooled with Bell in its retirement system? It wasn’t justified — it was quietly pushed through.

The real problem is politicians of all stripes and from the federal to the state to the municipal level have created an unsustainable two-tier system – the system of haves (government employees, who can retire as early as their 50s often with six-figure salaries) and the have-nots (private workers who will work until we drop and rely on measly Social Security returns and whatever savings and 401/k plans we have). Public employee unions would have us believe that there have been excesses at the top, but that the system is otherwise fine. They point to relatively low pension averages, which are deceptive given that averages include people who worked a short time in employee retirement systems and ignore the vast pension-spiking in recent years (and the fact that public retirement averages are around three times private averages).

The government employee excesses go top to bottom. California’s $100,000 Pension Club has 15,000 members and membership is growing by about 40 percent a year, according to the California Foundation for Fiscal Responsibility, which sponsors the database. Rank-and-file police and firefighters are found throughout that list. One cop in San Francisco – not the chief, mind you – has a compensation package of $517,000 a year. Public safety officials have abused the trust the public places on them, and have often trotted out the memory of 9-11, to enrich themselves beyond belief. They abuse overtime, disability retirements and other rules to in essence make themselves millionaires who can retire as early as 50 and live a life of leisure. They overstate the dangers they face and use emotional arguments to eliminate criticism of the plundering they seek from the taxpayer – and these unions have been particularly effective at intimidating politicians at the local level. Who doesn’t want the police and fire endorsement and to pose by police cars and fire trucks in campaign literature? No candidate wants to endure the endless hit mailers depicting them as enemies of public safety.

This is a bipartisan problem, even though Democrats tend to be wholly owned subsidiaries of the unions, except in rare cases. Unfortunately, in my days a writer for the Orange County Register in rock-ribbed Republican country, I rarely saw much protest as these enrichment schemes were publicized. Yet in liberal Democratic and heavily immigrant Bell, Calif., where a large percentage of the population is thought to be here illegally, the population has taken the all-American approach to dealing with scoundrels. I applaud them.

I’m often asked how to fix the pension system. It’s a tough one. The rules are rigged at every level in the unions’ favor, which is no surprise given that union-backed legislators have been writing those rules for years now, with no one paying much attention to them. But imagine what would happen if city residents showed up at city halls around California and the nation and showed the level of anger that Bell residents displayed earlier in the week. Maybe things might change.

It’s time to dump greedy and self-serving council members and legislators into the harbor, figuratively speaking of course.

Unfortunately we fear that the answer to the rhetorical questions posed above, increasingly, is “no”.  If somehow our national government were to set aside that day as “National Take a Day Off from Work Day” little would change.  Families would gather for a mid‑summer day of hot dogs, hamburgers, barbecue and good old fun.  Yes, the 4^th of July features flags and parades but they often seem divorced from what it is we are all celebrating. They provide a sort of faux patriotic pageantry with an abundance of food, sparkle and noise.

Actually the 4^th of July, by its correct name, is Independence Day.  It signifies the true meaning of what was declared on July 2, 1776 and affirmed by the Continental Congress on July 4:  the document known as the Declaration of Independence.  This simple document lays out the fundamental meaning of America and it touched off a bloody revolution and several years of war to establish that all our citizens have the right to an independent life, to the liberty that allows for the freedom to exercise one’s own judgment and to the right to pursue one’s own path, career, associates, friends, etc., e.g. the pursuit of happiness.

John Adams, in a letter to his wife Abigail, correctly predicted that the day (he referred to the actions of July 2 not July 4) would be celebrated for as long as the American experiment in government continued.

“The Second Day of July 1776, will be the most memorable Epocha, in the History of America.  I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival.  It ought to be commemorated, as the Day of Deliverance by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty.  It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.  You will think me transported with Enthusiasm but I am not.  I am well aware of the Toil and Blood and Treasure that it will cost Us to maintain this Declaration and support and defend these States.  Yet through all the Gloom I can see the Rays of ravishing Light and Glory.  I can see the End is more than worth all the Means.  And that Posterity will tryump in that Days Transaction, even altho We should rue it, which I trust in God We shall not.”

How Adams’ fervor has been eroded by time. What Adams did not and could not know is how, and what, future generations would learn about the meaning of Independence Day.  Adams, we suspect, would be heartbroken given the woeful performance by grade school and high school students on standardized American history tests, and the current minimization of demonstrations of patriotism by elitist intellectuals and their near embarrassment to exalt American Exceptionalism.

What, in fact, we are celebrating is not just the meaning of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness embodied in the Declaration.  Equally as important is the form of government that was established and then enshrined in the Constitution adopted in 1787 as the foundation and source of legal authority for the United States.  What was provided to us by the Founders is captured by an exchange (perhaps apocryphal) between a bystander and Benjamin Franklin.  At the end of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia a woman awaiting some announcement of the results that had been produced asked Franklin:  “What have we got, a republic or a monarchy” to which he responded, “a republic, if you can keep it.”

It is important to note that he did not answer “a democracy or a democratic form of government.”  The distinction between the two is important and worth considering, particularly this year.  In a “democracy,” majority rules with no protections against absolute and unlimited power.  It was “tyranny by majority” that the framers feared could run roughshod over the inalienable rights of the individual envisioned in the Declaration.  Jefferson, in particular, feared the excesses to which a mere majority could go.  He said, “an elective despotism was not the government we fought for.”

A Republic, on the other hand, embodies a different form of representative government.  Of course it is the people in democratic elections that choose their representatives (although initially, prior to the Sixteenth Amendment, the members of the Senate were chosen by the legislatures of the several states).  In a Republic, the rights and liberties of the individual are protected by a written Constitution and in our Republic there is a division of power between the three branches of government.  The overarching theme of our Constitution is limited government possessing only “just powers.”  James Madison, who is rightfully considered the father of our Constitution, feared the concentration of too much power in a national government and did not sign it. He thought it granted too much power to the federal government, but nevertheless saw enough good qualities in human nature to justify some confidence, and he summed up his position in Federalist 55 by stating, “Republican government presupposes these [good] qualities in a higher degree than any other form.”

A Republic attempts to safeguard the rights of the individual and the minority from the actions of a runaway majority, whereas in a pure democracy free elections at regularly scheduled periods render majority rule sacrosanct.  Both systems obviously incorporate a popular form of government but in a pure Democracy there are no safeguards against abuse of ordered liberty by whatever majority is in power.

This year in particular we can see what a large enough majority can do.  We need not repeat here all of the mandates and impositions included in health care reform, but we must, at least, mention the requirement in the law that every American must purchase health insurance or be subject to a penalty.  This new federal requirement is predicated upon the Constitutional provision that gives to Congress the power to regulate interstate commerce.   The political left, always seeking to impose more and more government control over our lives, is once again attempting to stretch the meaning of interstate commerce beyond what the framers could possibly have imagined and clearly beyond what they had intended.  The Constitution grants only certain limited powers to the Congress and then reinforces that limitation in the one-sentence-long Tenth Amendment (the last amendment in the Bill of Rights), which states “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

As we have seen, this is a far cry from the views of today’s Congress.  Virtually everything in our daily lives seems to be subject to the interference of, or regulation by, the federal government.  George Will, in his column published in theWashington Post on June 27 which discusses the forthcoming confirmation hearings for Elena Kagan, the president’s Supreme Court nominee, proposes that the Senate panel ask Ms. Kagan a series of questions designed to elicit her view of whether there are any limits on Congressional powers in our Republic.  He proposes, among others that the Senate panel ask the following questions:

• If Congress decides that interstate commerce is substantially affected by the costs of obesity, may Congress require obese people to purchase participation in programs such as Weight Watchers?  If not, why not?
• The government having decided that Chrysler’s survival is an urgent national necessity, could it decide that “Cash for Clunkers” is too indirect a subsidy and instead mandate that people buy Chrysler products?
• If Congress concludes that ignorance has a substantial impact on interstate commerce, can it constitutionally require students to do three hours of homework nightly?   If not, why not?
• Can you name [any] human endeavor that Congress cannot regulate on the pretense that the endeavor affects interstate commerce?

These questions and the concept of American Exceptionalism, as first described by Alexis de Tocqueville in 1831, are the kinds of things Americans should be pondering in addition to watching fireworks and enjoying the company of friends and family this July 4^th.  This is a Republic we have been given, “if” as Franklin is reported to have said, “we can keep it.”  Keeping it means knowing what it is to be fortunate enough to live in a republic such as that bequeathed to us by the founders, and how important that is to maintaining both our freedom from the oppressive government our founders feared and the liberty necessary to pursue our individual dreams.

By Hal Gershowitz and Stephen Porter

Still, I am struck by the breathtakingly steep arc of moral ascendency we have seen in this great country since the horrible bloodlettings that occurred on the battlefields of Shiloh, Antietam, Gettysburg, Spotsylvania and over six thousand others to determine once and for all what kind of country we would become.

That we have gone from a nation in which three million fellow Americans were held as slaves literally in chains and shackles, with no more legal rights than a goat, to a country that elects a Black man to the highest and most powerful office in the land says much about who we are as a people.

There will be those on the left who will predictably use the upcoming Independence Day holiday to highlight the hypocrisy of the Declaration we celebrate.  They will mock the document of a slave state that had the brazenness to announce to the world our vision of a better nation founded in the conviction that such basic human rights as life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness come not from governments or royals, but from a higher power than ourselves: Divine Providence.

But these cynics will miss the point.

The American experiment had to start somewhere.  And without that incredibly courageous initial push of the flywheel, the great events that followed which would lead to the emancipation of hundreds of millions from slavery and tyranny, not just on this continent but throughout the world where our American presence has been felt, would never have happened.  In the late eighteenth century, where tsars and kings and kaisers ruled Europe, shoguns and emperors the Far East, and slavery was universally practiced across the globe, our upending of the imperial order in favor of popular sovereignty was stunning in its audacity—and a great danger to the despots and lords who ruled the world.

Unique in the annals of history, the American Revolution which broke our allegiance to the British Crown was one led by learned, wealthy men who would have the most to lose should their treason be squashed.  Indeed, many of these gentlemen revolutionaries would ultimately suffer privation and ruin even though a victory was won.  Ours was not a revolution of the lows against the highs as was seen in bloody France in the 1790s, but rather it was led and prosecuted by the elites of colonial society.  And it was a movement to advance an idea that a citizenry does not owe its servitude to a crown but rather each other.

And so our revolution was as ethereal as it was commercial—and that distinctive quality has been the source of strength behind our nation’s durability throughout its many trials and tests over the past 234 years.   And it has been the key to our development as a people who can identify a terrible wrong or injustice as inconsistent with our ideals and terminate it—violently if need be.

As the haunting photograph of the two slave children reminds us, our revolution of 1776 was incomplete and fatally flawed in that “all men are created equal” only applied to Caucasians.  For the three million Blacks living in slavery in the United States before Appomattox, it was “all midnight forever.” As an ex-slave once reflected, her elderly voice pressed on a crackly vinyl recording: “You know what I’d do if I ever had to be a slave again? I’d take a gun and end it. ‘Cause you ain’t nothin’ but a dog.”

But that was then.  This nation has rolled over and been remade many times since the dark days of the triangle trade.  As any visitor to Gettysburg will attest, many Americans paid the ultimate price to wash away our original sin.  Today we Americans, all 300 million of us, can look back with pride at our history which relays the story of a new birth of freedom for mankind. And we can be comfortable with our exceptionalism as this nation has been an overall force for good in the world.  Hundreds of millions live in liberty as beneficiaries of the ideals that our Founding Fathers so confidently announced to the world as truths, even as a massive British flotilla sat anchored in the waters off New York preparing to crush their rebellion.

We who dwell in this city on a hill are the beneficent custodians of the principles handed down to us by Jefferson, Adams, Franklin and Washington.  And we are also tasked with carrying a reminder as seen through the eyes of those two slave children who have long since passed into history, of what can happen to our nation should we abandon those values that made us the great country we are today.

Thomas Paine: Wordsmith

Yet this man who made such an impact on the early days of the Revolution was an utter failure in business back in England, was dismissed from his position as excise officer because of neglect of duty, and separated from his wife in 1774 just as he decided to emigrate to America. If not for Common Sense, in particular, his influence on the new nation would have been negligible. Some people are great with words and little else. Paine fit that mold.

When the American Revolution ended, he tried his hand at inventing, but being unsuccessful at that, he eventually traveled to France to take part in the Revolution stirring there. He became a French citizen, served in the Convention [legislature], though without distinction [he couldn't speak French], and ended up in prison when the Revolution took an even more radical turn. Only the intercession of the American ambassador James Monroe extricated Paine from that predicament.

He then wrote The Age of Reason, an attack upon Christianity that did not go over well with the American public. Upon returning to America in 1802, he was not well received because of his radical religious views. Poverty, poor health, and alcoholism dominated his final years; his funeral in 1809 was attended by six people.

The name John Jay is relegated to the dim recesses of this same time period, at least among those who have only a cursory knowledge of the beginnings of the United States. Those who have studied it in depth realize what a debt is owed this man.

John Jay: Indispensable

In many ways, he was the anti-Paine. A New Yorker who lived in the New World all his life [his family were French Huguenots who had to flee Catholic persecution], Jay was far more conservative than his wordsmith counterpart. He participated in many of the meetings prior to independence, always offering words of caution. He even helped draft the Olive Branch petition to the king as a last desperate effort to keep the empire from civil war.

Once the decision for independence was made, however, Jay threw himself into the fray with total dedication. He worked at both the state and national levels during the Revolution: Chief Justice of the New York Supreme Court, then president of the Continental Congress. The Congress appointed Jay as ambassador to Spain to try to get more European backing for the new nation. He spent three years working in an almost thankless task, joining Franklin and John Adams at the end of the war as one of the chief negotiators with the British government for the Treaty of Paris.

Upon returning to the new United States, Jay was elected Secretary of Foreign Affairs, a post he held from 1784 to 1789. In the push to amend the Articles of Confederation, he collaborated with James Madison and Alexander Hamilton in authoring the Federalist Papers. He didn’t write many of them simply because he suffered an illness at that time.

In Washington’s first administration, Jay was called upon to serve as Chief Justice of the new Supreme Court. When Washington needed an experienced diplomat to deal with Great Britain, he called upon Jay. We would never today mix the branches of government the way Washington did in this instance, but he felt no one else had the experience to handle the British.

He then did something no one would do now: he resigned as Chief Justice to become governor of New York. In that capacity, he had the privilege of signing into law a bill leading to the gradual elimination of slavery in that state, a goal Jay had been working for his entire life.

After his governorship, Jay retired from public life, but he didn’t retire from activity. He later became president of the American Bible Society, another indication that he was the anti-Paine.

Activists today revere Thomas Paine, due to his strong words. Few know of John Jay. Paine’s contributions were primarily words; Jay’s contributions were actions that helped shape what the nation would be. In our desire to change what we currently see taking place in our government, it’s tempting to be a Paine [and some people are, in both senses], but wouldn’t it be better to be a Jay? Paines have their uses, but Jays are indispensable.