The Prerogative of Power
There is no power in freedom confined. A common sense view of liberty demands it be shared...and always defended.
Silly Brits...! Even after the ink had dried on their surrender at Yorktown, British General Charles Cornwallis, it's fair to say, still believed his army - superior in numbers, equipment, and training - had been beaten by an inferior force. After all, those ruddy Americans were no more than a rag-tag group of erstwhile farmers and pastors and shopkeepers. Well, that they were, but he couldn't have been more wrong.
Cannon and musket notwithstanding, the British weren't just beaten by a determined army of men. They were conquered by an irresistible idea that couldn't be defeated.
America was that idea, formed in the heart of God and birthed in the hearts of men; a nation set apart to become more than a mere land mass holding two oceans apart. America was destined to become the example to the world of individual liberty, equal rights, and a government whose sole power was derived from the sovereignty and consent of the governed.
Today, however, ask a hundred people in any American city to define the term National Security and you're likely to hear those hundred reply "military power," or "secure borders." Certainly those are aspects of our security.
But our real national security, our prerogative of power, is the shared ethic of liberty itself. It is a thing so powerful that, once possessed, is never easily exchanged for tyranny, but which calls every day to be explored individually, shared in common, and defended for all.
Alexis de Tocqueville observed of our fledgling republic, "The most natural privilege of man, next to the right of acting for himself, is that of combining his exertions with those of his fellow creatures and of acting in common with them." He also wisely knew, "their chief business...is to remain their own masters," but "to neglect to hold [liberty] fast is to allow it to escape."
Tragically today, amidst the most monumental struggle for the very existence of Western civilization, some Americans would willingly loosen their grasp to exchange their birthright for a mess of pottage. It is a wildly misguided notion that evil will ever accommodate negotiation but as a means of forcing surrender. To them we say, "you're free to live that way, but for us there is no master but liberty."
There, that's the idea...are you with us?
Please join us in a common sense movement to hold fast to our liberty and to encourage no American to ever let it escape their grasp.
