Based on the current political climate the United States is facing today, our generation is like spoiled children in the backseat of a car during a long road trip--agitated, frustrated, and needing to use the bathroom every five minutes out of boredom.
We won't shut up. We're constantly blaming one another and screaming at each other. Who are the parents in the front seat? Our forefathers, rolling their eyes and turning up the radio.
What the children in the backseat lack is self control, which comes from a lack of understanding. Even Edmund Burke (a political philosopher from the 17th century) would agree: "It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.”
So, if you want to complain about losing freedom--something God gave you, not a government--who's ultimately at fault?
For civil liberty to exist, we have due process. Law and order shape our behavior. How we handle our freedom is how we measure our liberty. We aren't in jail, because we aren't breaking the laws of due process. Nevertheless, how are we doing in a social capacity?
Not very well.
Self control is the qualification for liberty. If we lack self control in society, then we will surely suffer the consequences. Whether right or wrong, moral or immoral, what we do is the ultimate catalyst for what happens to our liberties.
We live in a world where we can unlike, unfollow, unfriend, block, report, or fact-check anything we deem unworthy of our socially-constructed value systems through an LED screen. We no longer listen to understand. We only listen to respond. This needs to stop, regardless of what political echo chamber we subscribe to.
Our forefathers are pulling over the car and reading the "family constitution" to us, so we remember who we are.
It's time for all of us to go back to our roots of due process--Democrats, Republicans, every American citizen. Even those who flirt with the idea of socialism, I especially invite you to the table to read about where this whole family trip started and why. The document that created a nation can save a nation: The United States Constitution.
This is what brings us back to earth. It's not a religion, because it can be easily amended and requires no religious test. It's not an ideology, because it's completely objective and makes no emotional appeal. The Constitution is what protects the rights of all Americans. It does not provide them.
Using Article V, we can start with regulating our own government. There is no other Constitution in the world that I know of where the people can peaceably assemble into a convention of states to regulate the laws of the land.
I leave you with a final thought. Seeing that even our elected officials evidently also lack self control, it's time to do a self-evaluation. While it's natural to blame the system (which has merit), we also need to look within.
Self-governance requires self control. Ask yourself what is it that you can do differently? How can you be better today than you were yesterday?
What are you doing right now to be the change you want to see in the world?
