Let's Focus On The Past - About 230 Years In The Past

There has been a lot of talk about letting go of the past and focusing on the future. I disagree with this. We need to look back. All the way back to our origins. We have already moved too far away from who and what we were supposed to be, and when leaders tell us not to focus on the past, they're telling us they don't want us to pay attention to how much further from our original purpose we're moving.

Obama doesn't want us to look back because he doesn't want us to really know these "principles and values on which we were founded" that he keeps quoting. This is due to the fact that he is violating almost every one of our true principles. Thomas Jefferson said to educate the people on their past, so that's what I am going to do today.

We talk a lot about common sense. That it's just common sense that a 50% tax rate is absurd. It's just common sense that government telling us what to do is bad. Well let's look at Common Sense, the pamphlet written by Thomas Paine and distributed in January of 1776. The Common Sense that rallied the colonists to revolution. The Common Sense that was the precursor to our Declaration of Independence. If' you've never read Common Sense, I highly recommend it.

Thomas Paine's pamphlet was incredibly powerful, and a past we should definitely focus on. All I will post today is part of the introduction, but that alone is a strong condemnation on where the colonies were at the time, and where the new nation has gone again.

"PERHAPS the sentiments contained in the following pages, are not yet sufficiently fashionable to procure them general favor; a long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defence of custom. But tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason.

As a long and violent abuse of power is generally the means of calling the right of it in question, (and in matters too which might never have been thought of, had not the sufferers been aggravated into the inquiry,) and as the king of England hath undertaken in his own right, to support the parliament in what he calls theirs, and as the good people of this country are grievously oppressed by the combination, they have an undoubted privilege to inquire into the pretensions of both, and equally to reject the usurpations of either."

A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right. How very true that statement is. We have accepted the growth and increasing power of our government as not being wrong, and as a result, current leadership is pushing the appearance that it is right. It is not right.

We have an undoubted privilege to inquire into the pretensions of our government and to equally reject the usurpations of either. I don't think there's any question that our leaders have become pretentious, and that they are usurping our rights. But are we exercising our privilege of inquiry? Are we holding our leaders accountable for the usurpations of our liberty and independence? Or are we accepting the superficial appearance of it's rightness. That's a question that only you yourself can answer.

Look back. Focus on our nation's past. Know where we started and he principles on which we were built. Educate yourself and others. And most importantly, take a long hard look at where we are and compare that to where we were supposed to be.