Got Me Thinking

This post has been sitting here for months, unpublished, so I guess it's time to review and finish it, huh?

I remember back in the "olden days," as I sat in a classroom full of other young minds begging for molding and shaping, hearing powerful phrases that have followed me through my life. They still hold great power for me, but I fear we're failing as a society to give them any meaning anymore. Some of the greatest words to escape man's lips have been gutted and left to rot in the summer sun.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. 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 to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.

Our rights are endowed upon us by the Creator. GOD. They are only protected by the government, not provided by the government. I ask those wishing to remove acknowledgment of God:

• What gives YOU the right to remove Him from our presence but denies US the right to invite Him into our lives?
  
• If you believe God does not exist - yet the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness guaranteed to you by our founding documents have been given to you only by God (NOT the government) - doesn't that mean you don't have those rights, since He does not exist and, therefore, cannot give them to you?
  
• If you have no rights, why do you flaunt them in courts of law to empower yourself and denigrate those of us whose opinion differs from your own?

I found this article (You Do Not Have The Right To) and I have to think that this is a more realistic view of how we should view society today - not "me" and "I" and "mine" and this overwhelming sense of entitlement many seem to be afflicted with. Society is not a lone individual but a group of individuals who must learn to co-exist if they are to continue to exist at all. Once again, something we're not doing a very good job of.

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

I found this article on the "blessings of Liberty" guaranteed to us by the Constitution. Makes you think.

After all of this (and lots of other stuff I can't get into a post without making it 850 pages long), I felt the power of yet another phrase echoing in my mind: "I have a dream."

I'm sure many before me and many more to come will wonder how different our society would have been had Dr. King not been taken from us. I read through his speech and can substitute "American citizen" for each occurrence of "Negro" and feel that it applies to the whole of our society today, not just the black man or woman. I wish he were here to guide us now.