Hope yet for liberty? Healthcare town halls show Americans still love freedom

August 19, 2:52 PMNY Conservative ExaminerTodd Keister

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Opponents of socialized medicine in Colorado.  Americans are vocally defending their few remaining liberties for the first time in a hundred years.  Photo/AP

The American public has stood by silently for nearly one hundred years as the federal government has steadily encroached upon their liberty. Since 1913, the federal government has gone from a distant entity that handled monetary policy, debated tariff guidelines, and ran the military, to an all-powerful leviathan that intrudes on their daily lives in ways our forefathers could only have envisioned in their worst nightmares.

Americans have watched congress shirk its legislative responsibilities and delegate ever-increasing unconstitutional authority to government agencies like the Departments of Labor, Education and the Environmental Protection Agency. They have allowed the congress to delegate its responsibility for coining and regulating the currency of the nation to the secretive Federal Reserve Board, which has given us an endless cycle of booms and busts as it tinkers with the money supply.

The American public and their state legislatures allowed the federal government to alter one of the constitution’s most important provisions with the 16th Amendment; allowing them to tax our incomes and spend it without regard for where or from whom they took the money.

Then in the 1930’s and 1960’s, first in the face of the Great Depression, then in the cause of phony altruism, Americans allowed their federal government to take over their retirement planning and healthcare for the elderly and indigent – and so today Social Security and Medicare consume the wages of the working even while they offer no hope of ever paying significant benefits to younger workers paying into the bankrupt systems.

Last year Americans went to the polls and elected an openly unreformed socialist as their president. In only six months, President Barack Obama, the God of hope and change, has changed nothing. The federal government continues to grow only now much faster. The national debt continues to grow except now at an unprecedented pace. Our currency remains insolvent and based upon nothing of value. Our taxes remain too high and promise to go higher still. Our corrupt politicians continue to treat our national treasury like their own private piggy bank, buying votes with pork barrel projects and federal grants.

Yet somehow in the face of a government takeover of the healthcare industry, Americans have rediscovered their appetite for freedom. Finally perhaps, after a hundred years of slumber, Americans have awoken to the nightmare that has engulfed their country. Nationwide, ordinary Americans have turned up at town hall meetings to confront members of the imperial congress and tell them that they will not tolerate federal interference in their medical care. Americans are once again angry and passionate about a threat to their freedom. Supercilious congressmen who see themselves as rulers and not representatives are simply at a loss as to how to respond to citizens who challenge their edicts. Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi calls protestors Nazis and “un-American.” Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has referred to opponents of the Obamacare plan “evil mongers,” and ABC News tried to connect socialized medicine opponents with domestic terrorists. Other Democrat mouthpieces suggest that the anti-socialized medicine protestors are stooges for insurance companies or are somehow “not representative” of a real shift in public opinion because there are organized efforts to get them to attend the town hall meetings. Perhaps King George should have simply dismissed the Boston Tea Party since it was clearly “manufactured” by the rabble-rousers at the Old South Meeting House. King George called the signers of the Declaration of Independence “wicked” and “dangerous and ill-designing men.” Like insults from an imperious king, attacks from the likes of Pelosi and Reid should be worn as a badge of honor.

Perhaps there remains a faint glimmer of hope for Americans to save their revolution. Maybe Americans have awoken to the fact that the counterrevolutionaries have a hundred year head start on dismantling everything the founders fought for and everything our soldiers have struggled to preserve through two centuries of conflict and sacrifice.

The great patriot Patrick Henry spoke of the tendency of men to close their eyes to an evil like today’s government;

“It is natural to man to indulge in the illusions of hope. We are apt to shut our eyes against a painful truth, and listen to the song of that siren till she transforms us into beasts…For my part, whatever anguish of spirit it may cost, I am willing to know the whole truth; to know the worst, and to provide for it.”

This month, in the angry shouts of Americans are heard the echoes of men like Patrick Henry and the signers of the Declaration of Independence who quite literally risked their “lives, fortunes, and sacred honor” in the pursuit of freedom. As our president attempts to extinguish the last flickering flames of liberty, could it be that Americans are finally ready to fight back? Generations of Americans have sacrificed to pass on the gift of freedom – to defend it now, we need only have the courage of our convictions. We have the luxury of defending liberty with our words and votes; we need not take up arms and risk everything as our forefathers did. We need only to take to the streets and the polls, and to stand resolute with our neighbors who have confronted the arrogant and privileged members of congress. Together, just maybe we can begin the long road back to liberty.