They came and they kept coming. The British came. The Dutch came. The Swedes came. The Germans came. The French came. The Spaniards came. The Italians came and the Greeks came. Individuals and families came because they were being religiously and economically persecuted in what had become tyrannical old Europe. They left their homes of a thousand years to settle in this new land called America. The risked everything to come for freedom. Some would never reach the shores of America and died on the voyage.
They found a pristine land and began to tame it. They carved out the forests to grow their crops and build their homes. They built churches to practice their faith. They opened businesses to ply their trades. They built public schools and colleges to bring education to the masses. They built huge seaports to accommodate the great sailing vessels from all round the world.
These pilgrims, hardened by adversity, first toyed with communism but found capitalism and land ownership more productive and profitable. Great thinkers, like Franklin, Adams and Jefferson began to wrestle with the elements of freedom and how to craft documents of a representative government. From those documents came the Articles of Confederation, the Declaration of Independence and the U. S. Constitution. But it took a war with England before true freedom would be born from the minds of long dead philosophers and new world statesmen.
After the Revolutionary War, with their collective foots planted firmly on the Eastern shores of America, they looked west to the vast forests, mountains and open plains of an unsettled land. They bought huge swaths of the West from France, Spain and England to connect the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. They forged steel and turned it into locomotives and railroads.
Once again a massive migration began westward across the mountains, the plains, the deserts and the forests. Americans were on the move again for that insatiable desire to own land and be free. They traveled by horseback and they came by covered wagon and they came by foot. They faced unspeakable obstacles in their path. From unmerciful weather, to steep mountains, deserts and rushing rivers to cross, to hostile Indians, to dust, to locus, they just kept coming. Many made it all the way to the Pacific and started a new life in the Sun. Many died along the way.
They built small towns and large cities as they moved west. They connected the cities with the stagecoach, the pony express, the telegraph and finally the railroad. To welcome in the new world of motorcars they built tens of thousands of miles of roads and bridges between the towns and cities.
To feed a hungry and growing nation they planted millions of acres in grain. They raised cattle, horses and sheep on the wide-open spaces to supplement the grain and ushered in the infamous cattleman and cowboy, which became an indelible icon of the west that still lives today.
These undaunted pioneers built factories to forge the steel. They built steam engines to drive our machines and power our industries. They extracted oil from the ground to refine gasoline for our cars. They discovered rubber to build the tires for those cars. They invented electricity to light and heat our homes. We no longer had to live in the dark at night.
They invented new fabrics to make our clothes, fabrics that were created from the dredges of oil refining. They built skyscrapers with the steel to house our great engines of commerce.
They created, invented and forged a nation of strong individuals, born of adversity, who found they could do anything to which they set their minds. They were proud, self-reliant and fiercely independent. They gave no quarter and asked for none. These were the pioneers that built America.
The blood of those pioneers courses through the veins and arteries of today’s American. Yes, we’ve grown soft and weak to some degree, but the principles of freedom and liberty are still part of our DNA. Those embedded principles can be re-ignited by the adversity of the conflicts and divisions that divide us. Because out of adversity comes strength, stamina and resolve. On this day of Thanksgiving, let us resolve to never let those principles die out of neglect, apathy, or fear.
In all of life’s creatures, nothing is as awesome as the goodness, beauty, strength, power, creativity, spontaneous generosity and spirit of the human individual, man, woman, or child. That beauty, strength, power, creativity, generosity and spirit is manifested best, when they are allowed to flourish under the umbrella of freedom. It is that individual freedom that allowed Americans to do what no other nation has done since the beginning of civilization.
Individuals, working either individually or collectively with other individuals, have been, are and always will be the movers and molders of a society. They are ultimately the decision makers and the risk takers, whether those decisions and risks be of the small variety covering our daily lives, or the ultimately large decisions and risks that set the direction of cultures, countries, or hemispheres.
Most positive human achievement comes as a result of efforts of and by an individual, not a society, or a culture ….. or a mob. Scientific discoveries, improvement in the human condition, or positive advances of government, come about from individuals working either by themselves or with a few others. A collective or a community didn’t invent the light bulb. Thomas Edison, an individual, did.
Individualism is the engine that keeps the wheels of a free economy turning. Individuals, running their own businesses, create sixty to seventy percent of all United States jobs. What a country we live in. What a tribute to its resilient peoples. We are people of guts, courage, intellect, enterprise, fortitude and compassion. We are individuals in a sea of individuals and there is no strength on Earth that can match ours, in spite of our perceived troubles. That strength and power is a direct result of individuals and individual expression, living free.
If we must emulate someone, let us emulate the individual achievers. If we must follow, then let us follow in the footsteps of those that pioneer and forge ahead no matter what the odds or what peril lays in front of them. Intelligent, wise men and woman of vision forged the constitution of the United States. Courageous, individual pioneers settled the West against all odds. Now today, the individual spirit of thousands of entrepreneurs start new businesses every day, risking their relationships with each other and their personal fortunes, no matter how large or small. They put up with every conceivable obstacle thrown in their path, not only from market forces but also by government regulation and edict.
That individual strength and power still lives today in millions of Americans. But an evil socialist force, in the form of a political party, is trying to strip that power from us by calling us names, demeaning our character and attacking our principles.
To counter that evil force millions of free Americans must bind them selves together by rallying around a Manifesto of Irrevocable Constitutional Principles and agree to preserve, protect and defend those principles at whatever cost. A few of those Principles from the Manifesto are shown below. There are 20 more principles covering a wide range of vital constitutional issues.
Principle No. 14 – LOBBYING: Restrict, by legislation, the access of narrow-focus lobby groups in Washington DC and State legislatures, including the all-powerful environmental lobby. We should be a government of the “people”, not special interest groups.
Principle No. 15 – TERM LIMITS: No public official shall be allowed to remain in one political office for more than two terms, forever. Entrenchment is an enemy of a good and just government, where remaining in office becomes a greater priority than service to country.
Principle No. 16 – SUBSIDIES: No group, business, agriculture, or otherwise [including Amazon] should be subsidized by the taxpayers. If a business cannot stand on its own based on sound business practices, then it should fail. Stronger, better managed, businesses should take their place.
We encourage each of our readers to take the time to review our Manifesto by clicking HERE.
A Canadian saw our Manifesto and couldn’t wait to get a copy. We wrote to him and asked him why a Canadian would be interested in an American Manifesto. He wrote back to us and said:
“To answer your question as to why a Canadian such as myself show interest in the irrevocable conservative manifesto. Well let me tell you I am a Canadian Patriot, I believe in Libertarian and Conservative ideals. The problem with Canada is that it is presently ruled by a hostile Liberal government led by Justin Trudeau who in my humble opinion is a rabid globalist who is selling out our country day by day, little by little to the globalists. I see my country progressively being “Islamified” and those Muslims being given special rights and privileges. Their stipend just for showing up on our shores is about 50K a year while many of our veterans are languishing in homeless shelters. Obviously there is a problem, and I want to be part of the solution. I am amazed on how your constitution is God given and was entrusted to your Founding Fathers to bring it forward. This is why I ordered your constitutional manifesto because it might act as a guideline for someone such as myself to become more politically active.”
Must it take a Canadian to make us finally wake up to the solid, God-given, unalienable rights of America’s beginning?
We have few choices left to preserve constitutional freedom in America. We either confront this evil force by peaceful means, or by war, or return to the global tyranny from which we escaped four long centuries ago. There is no other place on the planet to seek freedom. There are no more wild frontiers to conquer. There is no more free land to work. There is only freedom to preserve.
Our lives are easy and we have grown soft and accustomed to being pushed around by government. We hesitate to get involved out of fear, so we keep our heads low and out of sight. When one of our neighbors goes down to government abuse, we hide in the shadows and thank God it wasn’t us, just as the German people did in the first half of the 20th Century.
242 years ago, government was the enemy and the Founders knew it. So they crafted a document to hold government in check. But government has broken its constitutional bonds and is now free to tax us, herd us, corral us, abuse us and enslave us. Government is still the enemy today and to our detriment we let it out of its constitutional cage.
As an example, California Democrat Congressman Eric Swalwell just threatened American gun owners with nukes if they didn’t comply with gun confiscation. That’s how arrogant government has become. The next step is absolute power and ultimately enslavement.
Ladies and gentlemen, millions of Americans are still proud, self-reliant and fiercely independent. But if those millions of proud Americans do nothing, that globalism/socialist evil force will win and all Americans will become nothing more than indentured servants to government, or worse, international debt slaves to the one-world-order. Thanksgiving will cease to have any meaning whatsoever.
Our culture is hopelessly divided and in tatters. Our southern border is being overrun because of flawed immigration law. Most of the 13 colonies that gave birth to freedom are now socialist strongholds. Our national sovereignty is up for grabs. Our debt is in the stratosphere and our constitution is on the ropes. Our Republic is but a distorted image of its former self.
It is an undeniable truth. Those with the most money, or the most votes, or the biggest guns always win unless the people rise up and overwhelm those advantages with the power of the many. After what happened in the mid-term election of 2018, there’s not much time left to stop the socialist-one-world train. It’s on the tracks and picking up speed. But then which one of you is going to join with us to HERE?
© November 24, 2018 Ron Ewart – All Rights Reserved
~ The Author ~
Ron Ewart, a nationally known author and speaker on freedom and property issues and author of his weekly column, “In Defense of Rural America“, is the President of the The National Association of Rural Landowners (NARLO), a non-profit corporation headquartered in Washington State and dedicated to restoring, maintaining and defending property rights for urban and rural landowners. Mr. Ewart can be reached for comment at [email protected].
Mr. Ewart has been a continuing contributor to the Federal Observer since May of 2007.