The news hit me like the proverbial ton of bricks...
It was December 5, 2005, and I'd just heard the radio reporter say the upcoming year 2006 would be the first in US history Social Security and Medi-spending would consume over half of the federal budget.
After decades of discerning America was truly on its way to socialism culturally and politically, now the undeniable economic proof stared me straight in the face; man, was I ever depressed. And that depression – a soul-deep depression I’d never experienced before – lasted continually for the next couple of days.
I awoke on December 7, 2005, still in a humongous funk. But then I turned the radio on and immediately my depression lifted, for my ears were greeted with music of war in remembrance of an infamously solemn anniversary which my depression had abetted me in forgetting: Pearl Harbor Day.
A half hour later I was sitting on the cold, bare ground under the brightest of almost-winter blue skies, next to a grave marker in the Veterans section of one of America’s largest cemeteries: he'd been a flight engineer on B-29s during WWII, and he was an inductee into one of sport’s most elite Halls of Fame. He was also a lifelong acquaintance of mine, twice my age, and a dearly respected and cherished role model.
Just across from his final place of rest sat row upon row of the white, arching gravestones of hundreds of War Between the States dead – both Union and Confederate. As I sat by my hero, I imagined what the guy over there, under that marker, fought and died for. And what about that guy over there? And the guy lying at rest next to him? And that one?
Although those queries remained unmet, there was one answer I was sure of: not all of those dead fought and died for the same ideals, thus it was impossible to imagine all the different reasons/causes so many had felt were worth sacrificing their lives for.
But thinking of what others fought and died for wasn’t why fate had summoned me to that place of the dead that day, for I had evidently been called to answer, only for myself, a slightly different question: what are you willing to live and die for?
You can calculate yourself how many years have now passed since that morning among the fallen, but the absolute truth of my answer then seems to reaffirm itself almost each waking moment of every day now: God's gift of inalienable individual liberty to all is the only politic worth living and dying for, as it is this secular world’s only hope for any degree of meaningful freedom in a world history condemned to entropy.
There is nothing more needed spiritually today than that all called keep constantly turned to God, and that, politically, all tyrants, all those (and their collectives) who would oppress and employ force unjustly against any other individual, be identified and their crime(s) against all men be publicized. They then must be retired, whether in the physical or digital worlds.
I champion no political Party, I have not a drop of politically partisan blood in my body. I am an American by birth who grew up instinctively loving the accounts of America’s inalienable individual liberty-loving political creation with it's almighty reliance on God's grace. I am as classically American liberal as "they" come.
I, too, hold that freedom of conscience is an unalienable right of all men, and that the inherent integrity of the free market place of ideas is essential to positive human development. I also believe maintaining both those political cornerstones of individual liberty within the digital world is worth championing.
Samuel Adams was one of my very first political heroes; Patrick Henry was, too. And Thomas Jefferson seems to me to have possessed one of the very finest liberal political minds mankind has ever known. No matter the human faults they three possessed (just as we all do), the American revolutionary political passion they exalted for individual liberty is one I naturally, inalienably, share, too.
And as they appealed to Heaven for reliance and protection for their efforts in their time of political struggle, I, Samuel Patrick Jefferson, ask for Providence’s blessing for my effort here.
For the glory of God and the inalienable individual liberty of all...
Let's roll!