Ally and Matthew are not liberals, and they are not particularly unusual in our day and time. They are US Citizens by birth, but please understand, they are not Americans. They are the children of the immigrant waves of the last century, they are Euro-Americans. For the most part, they think, act and react like their European cousins across the sea; they have no inherited and innate memory of the true heritage of Americans, a people and a nation born of “FREEMEN,” Englishmen: Anglo-Saxons, Scots, Picts, Welsh, Britain’s, Normans, all of whom were never serfs, nor subjects of Lords, only subjects of King and Queen, and since the Magna Carta, these monarchs did not even rule, as did their European peers, as “absolute” and unrestrained monarchs.
Those hardy English souls who first migrated to the Virginia Coast, which includes both the first permanent English settlement on the continent, Jamestown, and the Massachusetts Bay Colony (the Pilgrims of the Plymouth Colony should be but a memory of an obscure Religious Sect which failed as a colony and was absorbed by the MBC) were and remain the epitome of “Americans,” God fearing, self-reliant, individualists who made a great Nation out of the beauty and endless resources of the Continent amidst the squalor and savagery of Stone Age denizens of the hundreds of nomadic tribes whose cities were built of logs and mud and straw, whose roads were animal paths and whose weapons were made of flint and rock. And who from 1607 to 1924 waged war by ambush, massacre and murder against White Settlers and even against each other. These are the Amerindian tribes which contemporary Liberals and progressives refer to, with wet glassy eyes, as “Noble Savages.”
And in the liberation of millions of pristine acres, in the freeing of tens of thousands of women and children from the bonds of servitude and the worship of false gods and the hegemony of misogynistic Chiefs and War Lords, millions of their American descendants can proudly claim to have “Native” blood, a line tempered by the blood of the first American settlers and the Amerindian women who willingly gave up their Paleolithic culture and pagan gods for the comfort of cabin and hearth and the God of Abraham and His Son, Jesus Christ.
Now to avoid a scholarly and tedious ethnogenic thesis, contrast my concise brief above with those who came later, on ships from Ireland, and Southern Europe, and numerous places where people feared government, feared their weakness and were patently unwilling to “free” themselves and their home country from monarchs and despots and inherited wealth and influence:
“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me…
And that is just what came, the tired, the poor, the weak, the homeless of European States. “Wretched refuse” send by the autocrats and bureaucrats of Europe, to rid their nations of “dead weight” and impoverished fecundity and of those few whose scant education led them to read Marx and Engels, and follow the course of anarchy to a passion for socialism and communism.
I intend no indictment of the millions of Americans descended from immigrants, who are informed, educated, ratiocinative and who by faith, not dogma, follow and obey the social gospel teaching of Jesus Christ and who have given far more than a cursory examination and contemplation of the History and Systems of the American Experiment. These Americans have come to understand the cost of liberty and freedom not through the experience of sacrificing for it (although there are many who have and are willing to give their life to pay that cost) but through their intellect, guided by the gifts of our Creator, and whose understanding of the cost and value of our Republic closely parallels the thinking of our Founding Fathers. It is apparent that the longer a family and its sub-cultural ethos has lived in America, the more likely they are to appreciate Liberty and Freedom, or the right to exercise individual choice or volition in choosing the penultimate value of life, participation, that is to say, citizenship in the National collective or society. That right to choose does not exist in the ultimate expression of individual volition, that of obedience to the Will of God. While one may be a Conservative, or a Liberal, a Democrat or a Republican, a Libertarian or a Libertine, or any combination thereof, there is no choice in obeying God’s Will, sinner or saint, saved or damned, no choice can exist between being and not being, salvation or damnation.
Euro-Americans inevitably and ostensibly leave their choices to be made by others. Pope, Primate, Prelate or Priest, they never fail to seek a hierarchical structure from whom they derive their identity, the result of multiple generations of inherited obedience to a collective society, to a hive, to an oligarch or despot, to a ruler from whom all personal worth, edification and gratification flows.
And here’s the conundrum, the incredible irony of valuing the individual above the collective, the state, the hive, as our Founding Fathers so passionately believed and sought to endow into every relationship between Citizen and State: Every US Citizen has the power, indeed the right to limit or even destroy the authority of the State, and remove from history the sole example of enlightened self-rule by men. For as our society has become far more complex and ethnically diverse, rather than stress discipline to the core values of our Republic, we have through ill-conceived amendments to the Constitution, appropriated State powers and prerogatives to the Citizen, rather without care and with but one sole concern, the reelection of the promulgators of the Lowest Common Denominator of Citizenship, place of birth!
I will not now, nor will I ever admit, that the ill-conceived vote of an ignorant, uneducated, or mentally deficient citizen of immoral or amoral or even criminal tendency is equal, as is posited under the Communist inspired Supreme Court Anthem of “One Man, One Vote,” to my reasoned contemplative examination of facts, figures and political innuendo and my prayerful acknowledgement of my own biases and self-serving desires and weaknesses toward the issue at hand.
Ally and Matthew benefit from the most obvious historical conclusion of the Nineteenth Century, the United States of America, the nation of Enlightened Reason and of Unalienable Rights, the first and only such nation in the history of man to date, was subverted and destroyed by those who fought for the Union, with a Union Army of immigrant transcripts and volunteers whose cheap blood washed away the sacrifices and beliefs of the Patriots who instigated, fought and won the only successful Revolutionary War in history and created a nation in which the rights of the individuals were always to be equal, if not superior, to the rights of the masses, the mob, the collective and the State. While the Bill of Rights created guarantees of Life Liberty and the Pursuit of happiness for all citizens, it did not include nor contemplate extending the Privilege of Voting to Universal Suffrage. Voting was then and should now be a privilege earned by a Citizen for an act other than parentage or birth.
Even in our times, it should be no less required of a Citizen to pass, on their 21st Birthday, or thereafter, a Citizenship test, as is required, in small degree, of all non-citizens who seek citizenship, but shouldn’t that test and the preparation for it, be as demanding as something as trivial as being admitted to college? Why not an SAT-C? A Scholastic Achievement Test – Citizenship! Pass it, learn our History, our Governance, our Culture and Vote, or Fail it, and simply continue enjoying every benefit a citizen is guaranteed. Would Matthew and Ally pass? Would you?