For the Children
August 16, 2008 by Aspen Eggimann · Leave a Comment
We live in an uncertain world. The “securities” that we once thought were so dependable are falling all around us. Guardrails that we put up in the past are now fences in our future. While observing warring nations, elections with disheartening candidates, and the continuing encroachment upon the rights of the family, I find myself wondering, “What kind of a world will my children live in?”
The following is to my children, but also to those who wonder about our future. The best way to see the future is to create it. Greatness is men and women who bridge the gap between what is and should be. Let us bridge the gap, take this vision and make it our future, for the children.
To My Children
I have so many hopes for you. My mind is filled with thoughts of your future and what it might entail. Let me tell you of them, the simple and the complicated. This vision of a future, possible if but worked for, is what I hope to give you.
I hope you learn of the love of God, not through an easy life, but in the peace in your trials and pain. Understand it is only through His hand that you will be strengthened. May you have sleepless nights filled with prayer, may you have the freedom to practice religion, talk about God in public, and can say the Pledge of Allegiance with His name in it.
I hope you love your country, even in its failings. See the greatness this land represents, and live your life upholding its founding beliefs.
When I talk about the Federal Reserve, the 17th amendment and welfare I hope I’m teaching you history, not current events.
When you’re eighteen I hope you can vote for people who you think will be good leaders and not have to choose the lesser of evils.
I hope you read the Constitution and Declaration of Independence and understand the inspiration and power that is behind them. Understand the ideas and beliefs they put forth and see the impact they had on our world.
And when you find that one person you want to spend the rest of your life with may marriage be between a man and a woman, respected and upheld by the community and nation.
Maybe by the time you are grown we will have a stable economy that protects the free market and encourages entrepreneurs and small business.
I hope you live in a place where hard work is the rule, not the exception. And where having blisters on your hands is normal. Hopefully you will know what it means to get kicked by a horse, to be lost in the woods, get your hands smashed by a hammer and have sore muscles. And when the day is over I hope you understand the words by Locke, “…and from his labor joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property.”
Boys, I hope you live in a world where you can get in a fight and it doesn’t get you qualified for anger management. Get a bloody nose or black eye and from it learn to never give up when you feel pain. May you have a father who can teach you how to clean a gun and fix the car.
Girls, may you live in a world where being a feminist means you are a woman being a woman. I hope you don’t think you have to choose between having a life and having a family but know how to make them the same thing. And maybe there will be men out in the world who were not raised on TV and X-Box but on hard work and good books, who can take care of you, who have learned what it means to sacrifice for their family.
And if its necessary, though I wouldn’t want it, may you send a father or brother off to win a war worth fighting.
I want nothing more than to have you missing for hours and then discover you hidden away reading a classic. When you play, pretend you are great men and women from history and literature. For what you pretend to be is who you will become. Education will be what you know and a high school diploma will be not be as important as your character.
In a darkening world you are who we prepare for. But the challenges of today will not be gone tomorrow even with valiant effort. For change is a continuum of effort from all generations and peoples. So do not slack in the pace but move forward continually improving yourself, your family, and our nation.
Move the Cause of Liberty by (1) subscribing to the Sentinel, a free weekly newsletter boldly illuminating the principles of freedom in a darkening nation, and (2) pledging your Life, Liberty, and Sacred Honor to the Cause by signing the Declaration of Dependence.
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Copyright © 2008 by The Cause of Liberty. All rights reserved.
The “McGuffy Paradigm” & Why It Should Be Revived
August 15, 2008 by Hyrum Lefler · Leave a Comment
Have you heard of the McGuffy Readers? Do you know there were 120 million of them sold in the middle part of our nation’s history? They were the standard educational text for America for a hundred years. So, what is in them?
Well, the first page of the first book talks about cats and rats, the second page shows the cat eating the rat, the third page is about a brother and sister trying out a homemade sail boat, fanning it because there is not enough wind. Skip down the pages; stories about boys that are fat getting caught in games of tag by skinny and fast boys, old men with makeshift bandages over broken legs, young girls being kind to old and young blind men.
Then we have three different notes on a bird’s nest with five eggs in it. “Do not rob the nest,” it says. And, “Tom will not rob a bird’s nest, he is too kind to do so.” Then a few more pages and we have twelve-year old boys chopping wood with the caption, “Ned and John are hard at work. John has a saw, and Ned has an ax. They will try to cut all of the wood which you can in the pile. Do you think they can do this in one day?”
Interesting…animals dying, skinny boys catching fat boys, charity for the downtrodden, protecting a bird’s nest. Young, unfortunate boys breaking a sweat — not to mention breaking child-labor regulations and facing dismal obituaries someday that may contain the words “hard worker” in them.
These stories are real! You know as well as I do that in the real world we don’t get anywhere by staying home forever and being entertained by The Cat in the Hat. No offense intended to fans of Cat in the Hat; I’m just a little burned out on the media-mania out there. I want some backbone to my children’s stories!
Life is an experience like no other! It is about toil, hardship, joy, service to others, excitement, challenges surmounted, focus, driving out the imperfections in ourselves, moving the cause of liberty, and making a difference! This is where we find our happiness. There is so much more to life than most of us realize and experience; we have so much dormant ability. As Thomas Jefferson put it, “Determine never to be idle. No person will have occasion to complain of the want of time who never loses any. It is wonderful how much may be done if we are always doing.”
Love the challenge! Face life with all its wonder, mystery, and difficulty. Take a stand in spite of opposition.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, recently deceased, was a man who lived life to the fullest. In a speech at Harvard he said the following:
“A decline in courage may be the most striking feature which an outside observer notices in the West in our days…A fact which cannot be disputed is the weakening of human beings in the West while in the East they are becoming firmer and stronger. Six decades for our people and three decades for the people of Eastern Europe; during that time we have been through a spiritual training far in advance of Western experience. Life’s complexity and mortal weight have produced stronger, deeper and more interesting characters than those produced by standardized Western well-being.”
Struggle? Isn’t that for foreigners — or at least anybody but “me”? It is time we all took a step back and asked ourselves some tough questions: Why are we fighting so hard for the stagnant life here in America? Why are we so intent on outsourcing our window washing, lawn care, weed pulling, the teaching of our children (public education), thinking (the media), policy making (anybody but us), and the good life (our entertainment gods and goddesses); and all this in the hopes of allowing ourselves the Pastoral boringness of a fake, aristocratic ease and laziness.
There is a constant discussion in our country about illegal aliens and the work that they do because we won’t. “Isn’t hard work something that migrant workers do?” we ask. Isn’t it our ultimate goal to get out of work, to “retire,” to “arrive” and never have to work again? No! It’s not — or at least it should not be if we want to call ourselves Americans! Work is for us, if we have a spine or any real desire for happiness and success in this life! “The love of work is success,” said David O Mackay.
Virgil also wrote of this in The Georgics:
“No easy road to husbandry assigned,
And first was he by human skill to rouse
The slumbering glebe, whetting the minds of men
With care on care, nor suffering realm of his
In drowsy sloth to stagnate.”
In our affluence, we have forgotten that happiness comes through work, service, love, and faith. The greatest nation on earth doesn’t know what it stands for anymore. Actually, WE as individuals don’t know what we stand for anymore. After all you and I are America!
Too many of us stagnate in the mire of complacency, afraid to be leaders. Make the change, not excuses! Join the Cause of Liberty, subscribe to the Sentinel, and experience the Georgic Revolution in your life!
Move the Cause of Liberty by (1) subscribing to the Sentinel, a free weekly newsletter boldly illuminating the principles of freedom in a darkening nation, and (2) pledging your Life, Liberty, and Sacred Honor to the Cause by signing the Declaration of Dependence.
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Copyright © 2008 by The Cause of Liberty. All rights reserved.
Question #7: What are “legitimate foundation” and “legitimate authority” in political philosophy?
June 24, 2008 by Stephen Palmer · Leave a Comment
| 10 Foundational Questions | Introduction | Question #1 | Question #2 | Question #3 | Question #4 | Question #5 | Question #6 |
“The fabric of American empire ought to rest on the solid basis of the consent of the people. The streams of national power ought to flow immediately from that pure, original fountain of all legitimate authority. –Alexander Hamilton
Simply put, legitimate foundation means the will of the People at large, while legitimate authority is the express permission granted by the People to the government to perform some function.
Put together, they form the philosophical foundation of the powerful idea that man does not exist for the state, but that the state exists for man.
Legitimate Foundation
The idea that the government should exist according to the will of the People and solely to benefit the People at large was revolutionary in the 18th Century. Previously, governments primarily benefited those governing, or special interests.
The American Founders taught that the will of the People, as expressed through constitutional means, is the only solid, sustainable, and legitimate foundation of republican government.
This does not mean, however, that they were referring simply to the concept of majority rule alone, as we learn from Federalist Paper #51; the idea is to guide the nation by the will of the majority, while protecting minority rights (i.e. preventing the majority from taking private property).
Legitimate Authority
Thomas Jefferson spoke of legitimate authority in the Declaration of Independence when he wrote, “…That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government…”
The United States Constitution was the first (and to my knowledge the only) constitution to be instigated by, or to have originated in, the People, then ratified by the People. In other words, the People, through their colonial representatives, called for the Constitutional Convention of 1787. Representatives at the Convention represented the People within their respective territories–not the government itself.
They were authorized by the People to do the will of the People. Our Constitution was initiated and created from the bottom up, rather than dictated from the top down. Then, after its creation by the representatives of the People, the Constitution was taken back to the People–once again through their colonial representatives–to be ratified, or accepted.
Previously, the historical norm was for the government–whether through a monarchy, aristocracy, or other form of ruler’s law–to dictate from the top down the laws and constitutional forms that the People must obey. As David Hume wrote in 1752, “Almost all the governments which exist at present, or of which there remains any record in story, have been founded originally either on usurpation or conquest or both, without any pretense of a fair consent or voluntary subjection of the people.”
Why It Matters
To drive the point home with these critical concepts, think of Read more
Make More Mistakes
January 25, 2008 by Stephen Palmer · Leave a Comment
We live in a culture that, from birth, discourages making mistakes. However unintentional, our educational system is generally designed to make us believe that mistakes are bad and should be avoided at all cost. Yet the reality is that making mistakes can be the most effective way to learn, provided we have the right attitude and proper guidance from wise mentors.
It’s precisely by learning that certain things are painful that we learn to avoid or correct them. The more we shield ourselves and/or our children from making honest mistakes, the more we all are crippled by the fear of acting. Education should be the process of open and honest experimentation where people are free to make guided mistakes in order to learn from them.
You may not be able to change our entire educational system, but you can begin to reprogram your mind to see mistakes in a productive light. There’s no need to be naive and simple-minded about this by rushing out to make unnecessary, juvenile mistakes, but we must find mature ways to overcome fear if we are to truly achieve our highest potential.
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Wash Your Bowl
January 25, 2008 by Stephen Palmer · Leave a Comment
How are your current experiences affected by your past perceptions? Are you able to open your mind and heart to new insights by detaching from the baggage of your perceptions?
In ancient Zen literature, the story is told of a new monk arriving at a monastery. He approached Joshu, the head of the monastery, and said, “Please teach me.” Joshu asked, “Have you eaten your rice porridge?” The monk replied, “I have eaten.” Joshu said, “Then you had better wash your bowl.”
Think of this parable as it relates to your mind. Is your “bowl” dirtied from the past? Although our perceptions from our experiences can be helpful, many times they limit and constrain our possibilities. Learn to clear your mind of past perceptions in order to be open to new insights and original solutions. The universe cannot fill a vessel that is already full.
Move the Cause of Liberty by (1) subscribing to the Sentinel, a free weekly newsletter boldly illuminating the principles of freedom in a darkening nation, and (2) pledging your Life, Liberty, and Sacred Honor to the Cause by signing the Declaration of Dependence.
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Copyright © 2008 by The Cause of Liberty. All rights reserved.
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